Hide from search engines

Keep locked pages and products out of on-site search, your sitemap, and search engine results.

This behavior is available on locks that protect Products and variants, Collections, Pages, or Blogs and articles. It controls whether a protected item can be found through your storefront's own search box, or through search engines like Google, rather than what a visitor sees once they land on the page itself.

The Google settings panel is confirmed to show these exact fields for Products and variants and Collections content types. Other content types listed above may show the same options, a variation, or none — check the panel for your specific content type.

Reach this setting

1. Open Locks and create a new lock, or open an existing one to edit it.

2. On the Lock setup tab, choose a content type that supports this behavior — Products and variants, Collections, Pages, or Blogs and articles — and select what to protect.

3. Click the Unlock rules tab, then add your access rules in the main column.

4. On the same Unlock rules tab, find the Google settings section in the right-hand sidebar, alongside the Blocked visitor behavior panel.

The Google settings section controls whether locked content is discoverable through search.

Hide from search & sitemap

Turn on Hide from search & sitemap to remove the protected pages or products from your storefront's own on-site search results and from the sitemap Shopify generates for search engines to crawl. In plain terms: shoppers using your store's search bar won't find the locked item, and search engines will have a harder time discovering the page at all, since it's no longer listed for them to crawl.

Add the "noindex" meta tag

Once Hide from search & sitemap is on, a second option becomes available: Add the "noindex" meta tag to protected content. This adds a noindex instruction to the page whenever access is denied by this lock, which directly tells search engines not to index or show that page in their results — even if a visitor or a search engine bot reaches the URL directly (for example, from an old link or a listing you haven't updated yet).

In plain language: Hide from search & sitemap stops the page from being actively listed and crawled; the noindex tag is a stronger, explicit instruction that keeps a search engine from indexing the page even if it does reach it some other way. Turning both on gives the most complete protection from search visibility.

Both options may require a paid plan. If your current plan doesn't include this feature, the app shows an upgrade prompt instead of the checkboxes, and the noindex option stays disabled until "Hide from search & sitemap" is turned on.

Click Save once you've made your choice.

Related docs

• Lock behavior overview

• Hide from menus

• Hide price and Add to cart

• Products and variants