Your site tells search engines not to index it
This page carries a `noindex` directive in {source}, which instructs Google and every other search engine to leave it out of their results entirely.
Why it matters
This page carries a `noindex` directive in {source}, which instructs Google and every other search engine to leave it out of their results entirely. If this is your production site, it cannot be found by search at all — no ranking, no traffic, no discovery. This is nearly always a leftover from a staging or preview deployment that shipped with the rest of the code, and because nothing errors and nothing looks broken, it commonly goes unnoticed for months while the site simply gets no organic traffic.
How ShipReady detects it
Search-engine basics, deliberately shallow. Lighthouse does SEO auditing thoroughly, for free, from Google, built into every browser. This module does not try to compete with that and should never grow to. It exists so a ShipReady report is not conspicuously silent on the subject, and it covers exactly the things a founder is likely to have got wrong without knowing — chiefly a `noindex` left over from staging, which makes a site invisible to search entirely. Every rule reads only the page HTML and response headers already fetched by PageContext. The module issues **no HTTP requests of its own**, which is why it can be this cheap: it is pure analysis of bytes the scan already has. Deliberately NOT covered: keyword analysis, backlinks, content quality, Core Web Vitals, and anything else that needs crawling or a second data source. Also not duplicated here: title, description, og:title, robots.txt, sitemap.xml and custom 404, all of which the readiness check already reports.
Detection is deterministic. ShipReady reports this only when it observes the condition directly, and prefers to miss a real problem over inventing one. Rule version 1.0.0.
How to fix it
This is the prompt ShipReady puts in your report — written to be pasted straight into Cursor, Claude Code, or whichever assistant built the app.
Your production site carries a noindex directive, so search engines are being told to leave it out of their results entirely. Find and remove it: check for a <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> tag in your root layout or page head, and for an X-Robots-Tag header set in your hosting config (vercel.json, netlify.toml, next.config.js headers, or a CDN rule). If you need staging kept out of search while production stays indexed, set the directive from an environment variable rather than hardcoding it, so only the preview environment sends it. After removing it, request indexing for your homepage in Google Search Console rather than waiting for the next crawl.
Frequently asked questions
- What does "Your site tells search engines not to index it" mean?
- This page carries a `noindex` directive in {source}, which instructs Google and every other search engine to leave it out of their results entirely.
- How serious is it?
- ShipReady rates this high. Fix before launch. A real weakness that an attacker can act on.
- How do I fix it?
- Paste the fix prompt on this page into Cursor, Claude Code or your AI editor. It is the same prompt ShipReady puts in your report.
- Can I check my own site?
- Yes — ShipReady scans up to ten pages of any public site for free and reports this alongside every other check.
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