Where is my noindex coming from? 3 places it hides (and how to check each with curl)

Your page loads fine. The HTML looks clean. But Search Console says "Excluded by 'noindex' tag", and you can't find the tag anywhere. I ran into this so often while building a site monitor that I wrote down where the noindex actually lives. There are 3 places. Here's how to check each one from the terminal. 1. The meta robots tag (the one you can see) This is the one everybody knows. It sits in the <head> of the page: <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> Check it: curl -s https://quietwatch.app/signin | grep -io '<meta[^>]*robots[^>]*>' <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> That sign-in page is noindexed on purpose. If one of your real pages shows this, the usual causes are: WordPress: Settings → Reading → "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" left ticked after launch. It adds the tag to every page. An SEO plugin (Yoast, Rank Math) set to noindex for that post type. A staging setting copied to