Search engine settings

Public status pages can be found through search engines. Two settings control how: one keeps the page out of search results, the other sets the description shown under its title. Both live in the page editor’s Access section.

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Hide a page from search engines

A hidden page:

• tells search engines not to index it, through a noindex robots meta tag and an X-Robots-Tag: noindex, nofollow, noarchive response header on every route of the page;
• is left out of the page’s sitemap (/sitemap.xml returns no entries).

Visitors with the link still see the page as usual. Hiding is not access control: to restrict who can open the page, change Who can view this page. Search engines drop a page from results only after they next crawl it, which can take days.

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Restricted pages are always hidden

Pages with any access mode other than Public (password, IP allowlist, JWT, or customer-scoped) are always hidden from search engines, whatever the switch says. The switch shows as on and cannot be changed for them. A customer-scoped page also never puts its name in its title or link preview before access is granted, since the name could reveal the customer.

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Set the search description

The search description is the text search engines and link previews (for example in Slack, LinkedIn, or X) show under the page title. When Hide from search engines is off on a public page, the Access section shows Search description. Enter up to 300 characters; around 150 reads best in search results. Leave it empty to use the default, “Live status and uptime for page name. Current service health, incident history, and recent uptime.”, which follows the page language. A custom description is used as written, in every language.

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What gets indexed

For a public page that is not hidden, the sitemap lists two URLs: the status page itself and its incident history (/incidents). The page’s robots.txt allows crawling of the page and blocks the per-visitor paths: subscribe, confirm, unsubscribe, preferences, unlock, and the Reliability Center’s statement and access pages.

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Incident permalinks

Every incident and maintenance window has its own page at /incidents/<id>. Notification emails, Slack and Teams messages, webhook payloads, feed entries, and calendar events all link there, and search engines can index these pages through the incident history. Each permalink declares itself as its canonical URL.

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Paged history

The incident history shows the 50 most recent updates. Older updates pages back through earlier ones with /incidents?before=<timestamp>. Every history page declares /incidents as its canonical URL, so search engines treat them as one page rather than many near-duplicates.

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Custom domains

When a page has an active custom domain, the custom domain is the canonical home: the page’s metadata points there, the custom domain’s sitemap lists the page, and the use.observer subdomain’s sitemap lists nothing. The Hide from search engines switch applies to both addresses. See Custom domain.