robots.conflicting
The page's robots directives contradict each other (index and noindex, or follow and nofollow); Google applies the more restrictive one.
What to change
Keep one directive for indexing and one for following, in one place. A platform or CDN often adds X-Robots-Tag on top of the page's own meta robots; remove the one you did not mean.
The documentation on developers.google.comA finding of this rule on a page carries the exact edits for that page: the markup it quotes, and what to write instead.
When it runs
Runs on every SEO audit: of a page, a crawl, a build directory or HTML. Info is a best practice: worth doing, rarely urgent, and --no-info leaves it out. Each finding takes 1 point off the page's score.
The severity here is the rule's usual one: a finding can be raised or lowered when the page gives a reason.
Run it, or skip it
Check a page for this rule alone, after a fix for instance:
npx @rivi-software/agentic-seo-check audit https://example.com --rule robots.conflictingOr from an assistant, with the MCP tool seo_audit_page:
{
"url": "https://example.com",
"rules": [
"robots.conflicting"
]
}To leave it out of an audit, pass --disable robots.conflicting on the command, or disableRules: ["robots.conflicting"] to a tool.
More in Indexing and robots
All 7 rules- Warning
robots.noindexThe page tells search engines not to index it (meta robots or X-Robots-Tag). - Info
robots.nofollowThe page tells search engines not to follow its links. - Warning
robots.malformed-directiveA robots directive is written in a form Google does not document, such as "no-index" for noindex (warning) or "noindex nofollow" without a comma (info). - Warning
robots.unavailable-afterThe page sets unavailable_after (meta robots or X-Robots-Tag) to a date that has passed, so Google no longer shows it in search results (warning), or to a date Google cannot read, so it ignores the rule (info). - Info
robots.max-image-preview-missingAn article page sets no max-image-preview, so Google Discover shows it with a small thumbnail instead of a large image. - Warning
meta-refresh.redirectA <meta http-equiv="refresh"> sends visitors to another URL. Google reads an instant one as a permanent redirect (info) and a delayed one as a temporary redirect (warning), and prefers a redirect from the server.