How to turn off "Discourage search engines" in WordPress
To turn off "Discourage search engines" in WordPress, open Settings → Reading, find Search engine visibility, untick Discourage search engines from indexing this site and click Save Changes. The site-wide noindex, nofollow tag disappears at once, and the XML sitemap comes back.
The box is often ticked during development, or at install time on the "Search engine visibility" line of the setup form, and then forgotten at launch. While it is on, no page of the site can be indexed, whatever else you configure.
Step by step
1. Confirm the setting is the cause
Open the Dashboard and look at the At a Glance box. When the setting is on, WordPress shows a Search engines discouraged reminder there. You can also view the source of any page and search for name='robots': a discouraged site prints noindex, nofollow on every page, the homepage included.
2. Untick the box
- Go to Settings → Reading.
- Scroll to Search engine visibility.
- Untick Discourage search engines from indexing this site.
- Click Save Changes.
With WP-CLI the same change is one command, which is handy on a host where the dashboard is slow:
wp option update blog_public 1
The option is called blog_public. A value of 0 means discouraged and 1 means public.
3. Clear every cache
The noindex tag is baked into cached HTML. Purge your page cache plugin, any server cache your host runs, and your CDN. Skipping this is the most common reason the tag still shows after the box is unticked.
4. Check the robots meta tag
Open the homepage and one post in a private window and view the source, or run:
curl -s https://example.com/ | grep -i "name=['\"]robots"
Core WordPress should now print only max-image-preview:large. With Hydrogen SEO you should see index, follow plus the snippet and preview directives set on the Robots screen. If noindex is still there after purging, a per-page or per-post-type setting is responsible, not this box: see how to find noindexed pages.
5. Check robots.txt and the sitemap
Open https://example.com/robots.txt. Since version 5.3, WordPress on its own no longer writes Disallow: / for a discouraged site and relies on the meta tag. Hydrogen SEO does serve User-agent: * and Disallow: / while the box is ticked, and it locks its robots.txt editor with a warning. After you untick the box the normal file returns, with the Sitemap: line. Then open your sitemap URL. The core sitemap at /wp-sitemap.xml returns a 404 while the site is discouraged, because core switches sitemaps off for non-public sites.
6. Ask Google to recrawl
In Search Console, inspect the homepage with URL Inspection, run Test live URL and confirm Indexing allowed? Yes. Then click Request indexing for the homepage and your main pages, and resubmit the sitemap. Pages that Google crawled while the tag was on sit under Excluded by 'noindex' tag in the Pages report until they are recrawled.
How long recovery takes
There is no fixed time. Google has to recrawl each URL to see that the tag is gone, and it revisits important pages sooner than deep ones. A site that was never indexed, because it launched with the box ticked, is in the same position as a new site: Google says showing up in results can take from hours to several months. Requesting indexing for key pages and submitting the sitemap are the two things you control.
Why the box exists
It is meant for sites that are not ready: a build in progress, a staging copy, a private project. WordPress notes under the checkbox that "It is up to search engines to honor this request", and that is accurate. The setting is a request, not access control. If a site must not be seen at all, protect it with a password at the server level and keep this box ticked as a second layer.
Common questions
Where is the Discourage search engines setting?
Under Settings → Reading, in the Search engine visibility row. It is a single checkbox labelled "Discourage search engines from indexing this site".
I unticked it but the noindex tag is still there. Why?
Almost always a cache. Purge the page cache, host cache and CDN, then check in a private window. If it persists, the page or its post type has its own noindex setting.
Does the setting block Google completely?
No. It asks search engines not to index the site by printing noindex on every page. Crawlers can still fetch pages, and a crawler that ignores the tag is not stopped.