Pages carry noarchive or nocache

Why it matters

Bing's September 2023 announcement says content tagged NOARCHIVE will not be included in Bing Chat answers, that for NOCACHE only the URL, snippet and title are shown, that a page with both is treated as NOCACHE, and that such content still appears in Bing's search results.

What to do

Look at the finding: it shows the tag, the tokens it holds and their effect under Bing's policy.
If you want Bing's answers to use more of the page, remove noarchive or nocache from the tag, then check for the same controls in its X-Robots-Tag header.
If you added it on purpose, dismiss the finding.

When to leave it as it is: if you intentionally limit how Bing uses this page in its answers, you can leave the tag in place.

What we read

We read the robots and bingbot meta tags in each crawled page's <head>, and its X-Robots-Tag header; googlebot meta tags do not supply the reported noarchive or nocache declarations, though they can affect page eligibility through noindex.

An indexable page is reported when one of those meta tags contains noarchive or nocache. A token only in the X-Robots-Tag header is not reported on its own, but when nocache applies to Bing in an eligible meta tag or a physical header field, the finding describes the nocache effect. Pages with noindex or a canonical to another page are left out.

A page is marked as not checked when it did not answer 200, its HTML could not be read in full, for example with unsupported SVG markup, its head contains <noscript> or an element that belongs in the body, or the physical X-Robots-Tag field boundaries are unavailable or invalid.

Example & evidence

Illustrative example — one page's robots tag, not a live audit.

https://bakery.example/recipes/ has:

<meta name="robots" content="noarchive">

The page is indexable and its robots tag holds noarchive, so it is reported with the tag.

A possible correction, if Bing's answers may use the page: remove the tag, or drop noarchive from it.

Confirm & check again

Check for yourself: view the page source and search its meta tags for noarchive and nocache.

Check again: Full audit — run a new audit of the site. This finding can close only after the page and its physical X-Robots-Tag fields are checkable and either its robots and bingbot meta tags no longer hold either token or the page is known to be outside this rule's indexable scope. Moving a token only into the header can remove this rule's meta-tag finding, but Bing may still honor the header, so that is not a fix for the underlying restriction. A page that cannot be read, answers 404, is not crawled again, or has unknown physical header fields cannot prove a fix.

Limits & sources

The check reads the tags; it does not query Bing or any Microsoft service, and every effect described comes from Bing's 2023 announcement, which named Bing Chat. The Bing effect is based on Bing's statement; page eligibility also uses Google/generic noindex, but this rule does not assess Google's use of the page.

Confidence: High because the tags are read directly from the page.

Sources

Microsoft Bing, Announcing new options for webmasters to control usage of their content in Bing Chat — says NOARCHIVE content will not be included in Bing Chat answers, NOCACHE content is shown only with URL, snippet and title, a page with both is treated as NOCACHE, and both still appear in search results. Checked 28 September 2026.
Microsoft Bing, SEO best practice for subscription-based and paywall content — explains that X-Robots-Tag noarchive or nocache has the same effect as the corresponding robots meta tag. Checked 29 September 2026.

Editorial review: 29 September 2026

Snippet controls that may be unintentional — snippet controls that may be there by mistake.