What is noarchive?

Syntax

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

Or as a header, which also works for PDFs and other files:

X-Robots-Tag: noarchive

It combines with other values in one tag, for example content="noindex, noarchive". Bing accepts nocache as a synonym.

What it does now, engine by engine

Google. The cached-page link no longer exists in Google Search, and Google's robots documentation lists noarchive as a rule it no longer uses. Adding or removing it changes nothing in Google.

Bing. Bing still documents the rule as preventing a cached copy. Microsoft has also described it as one of the signals publishers can use to limit how page content is used in its AI chat answers, with nocache allowing only the URL, title and snippet to be shown and noarchive keeping the content out of those answers. If that matters to you, check Bing's current webmaster guidance before relying on it, because this area is still changing.

Everything else. The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine and similar services are not search engine caches and do not take instructions from this tag.

Common misunderstandings

• "It hides my page." It does not. The page is indexed, ranked and shown with its snippet as usual. To stay out of results you need noindex.
• "It stops AI training." It is not a training control. Crawlers that collect data for AI models are addressed by name in robots.txt; see AI crawler.
• "It protects changed prices or deleted text." The cache was one place old versions lingered. Snippets and the index itself update only when the page is recrawled, with or without this rule.
• "More directives means more protection." Stacking noarchive onto every page adds bytes and nothing else in Google.

Should you use it?

For most sites, no. If it is already on your pages it is harmless, so there is no urgency to remove it either. The cases where it still earns a place are narrow: pages where you do not want Bing to offer a stored copy, or where you are deliberately using it as part of Bing's content controls.

For genuinely sensitive pages, WordPress itself pairs it with noindex: core adds noindex, noarchive to screens such as the login page.

Where the setting lives in WordPress

SEO plugins usually expose it next to noindex and nofollow. In Hydrogen SEO it is one of the robots options you can set per content type and per post; see robots meta settings. After changing it, confirm the output in the page source: there should be one robots meta tag, with the values you expect, and no second tag from a theme contradicting it.