What is nofollow?
Nofollow is an instruction, set on an individual link or inside the robots meta tag, that tells a crawler not to treat a link as an endorsement of the page it points to, and it governs how authority flows between pages, not whether a page gets crawled or shown in results.
Nofollow is often confused with noindex because both can appear in the same meta tag, but they control different things. Noindex says don't show this page in results. Nofollow says don't pass this page's endorsement through its outbound links, which was originally a way for sites to link to something, a comment section, an ad, a source, without that link counting as a recommendation.
On an individual link, rel="nofollow" tells a crawler to discount that one link's signal without necessarily stopping it from following the link at all, since major search engines have said for years that nofollow is treated as a hint rather than a strict command. For AI crawlers specifically there's no public standard for how nofollow affects whether a linked page gets used as a source, so it shouldn't be relied on as a way to keep a page out of an AI answer.
Related
- the robots meta tagThe robots meta tag is an HTML tag placed in a page's head that tells a crawler what to do with that specific page after fetching it, most often noindex, and it only works if the crawler was allowed to fetch the page in the first place.
- IndexationIndexation is whether a search engine has stored your page and is willing to return it. Being crawled is not the same as being indexed, and being indexed is not the same as ranking.
- robots.txtrobots.txt is a file at a site's root that tells crawlers which parts of the site they may fetch. It is a request, not an enforcement mechanism.
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