Meta keywords: the tag Google disowned in 2009, and never once reconsidered

A tag built for an older, more trusting web

The <meta name="keywords"> tag dates back to the mid-1990s, a period when search engines had far less text to analyze and leaned on a page telling them, directly, what it was about. That trust got abused almost immediately. A site owner could list every term they wanted to rank for inside the tag, regardless of whether the page covered any of them, and some early engines rewarded the trick. By the time Google had a search quality team large enough to write public policy, the exploit was old news inside the industry. Google did not discover a new problem in 2009. It made an existing one official.

September 2009: Google says it outright

Matt Cutts, then head of Google's Search Quality team, published a post on the Google Webmaster Central blog on 21 September 2009 that closed the question as far as Google's own ranking systems go. "Google doesn't use the keywords meta tag in our web search ranking," the post stated, adding that keywords placed there "simply don't have any effect in our search ranking at present." The post also explained the reasoning: the keywords meta tag "was so often abused" that Google had already stopped factoring it in, years before the announcement made that fact public. Google left the door open in theory, noting the tag could be used again someday, while stating it saw "no need to change that policy." Seventeen years on, it hasn't changed it.

Bing's answer is messier, and that messiness is useful

Bing never gave one clean statement the way Google did. The way its position shifted over nine years says more anyway. In 2011, Bing's senior product manager for webmaster outreach, Duane Forrester, told a WebmasterWorld discussion, reported by Search Engine Land, that "meta keywords is a signal. One of roughly a thousand we analyze." He added a warning in the same breath: "Abusing meta keywords can hurt you." That's not an endorsement of filling the field in. It's Bing saying the tag was being watched mainly to catch people gaming it.

By 2014, Bing's own language had hardened into something closer to Google's. A Bing representative described the tag as "dead in terms of SEO value," a phrase Search Engine Roundtable traced through to May 2020, when Bing's Christi Olson confirmed the position had not moved: Bing still excludes and ignores the tag. In the same piece, Bing's Frédéric Dubut declined to rule out ever using it again, on the grounds that ranking signals change over time. But nobody at Bing has pointed to a case where that happened since.

Even Google's own product dropped its version of the idea

The clearest sign this field has no future, even inside Google, is what happened to a narrower relative built for a single Google product. Google News once supported its own news_keywords meta tag, a separate piece of markup publishers used to flag topics for the News index specifically. Search Engine Roundtable reported in February 2018 that Google had quietly stopped supporting it around October 2017, removing the tag's help documentation without announcing the change first. John Mueller confirmed support had been dropped, and Google's SearchLiaison account later said publishers did not need to remove the tag from existing pages, since Google would simply keep ignoring it going forward. Google apologized for not communicating the change sooner. Even a version of this idea built and maintained by Google itself, for a product Google itself ran, ended the same way the general tag did a decade earlier: quietly retired, then ignored by default.

What Google's documentation says right now, in 2026

This is the part that settles any "maybe that changed" doubt. Google's current, live page on meta tags and attributes that Google supports lists the keywords tag under "Unsupported tags and attributes," stating: "The meta-keyword tag is not used by Google Search, and it has no effect on indexing and ranking at all." The same documentation names the meta tags Google does act on, description, robots, viewport, google-site-verification and a handful of others, which makes the omission a deliberate one, not an oversight. Google updates this page regularly. The keywords tag has sat on the unsupported side of it for as long as the page has existed in anything like its current form.

2023: the same answer, fourteen years later

Fourteen years after Cutts' original post, John Mueller gave an on-camera answer that could have been lifted word for word from 2009. Search Engine Roundtable reported on 1 September 2023 that Mueller stated plainly, in a video: "We do not use the contents of the keyword meta tag in Google Search." The same article resurfaces a 2012 Matt Cutts video making the identical point in five words: "So we don't use meta keywords at all." Two Googlers, eleven years apart, saying the same thing about the same tag, is not a coincidence. It's a policy nobody at Google has ever found a reason to revisit.

Why the field is still sitting in your CMS

None of that history stopped the tag from shipping as an editable box in WordPress, Shopify, most page builders, and plenty of custom CMS platforms built decades after Google's 2009 announcement. Habit explains most of it. Removing a field nobody is actively harmed by never makes anyone's priority list, and a field that shipped in version one tends to survive every redesign after it. Yoast SEO is the one documented exception worth naming: the plugin shipped an optional meta keywords field for years, then removed it outright in version 6.3, treating the field's removal as a deliberate cleanup rather than an oversight. Most platforms never made that call. The tag persists less because anyone believes it still works and more because nobody has prioritized taking it out.

What actually does the job this tag never did

Telling Google and a reader what a page is about still matters. It just runs through different fields entirely. The title tag and meta description shape what shows up in a search result and, per Google's own guidance, can influence click-through even where they do not touch ranking directly. The words inside your H1 and opening paragraph do the identification work the keywords tag was always meant to fake. Our guide to whether on-page SEO still matters covers how much of that identification signal survives Google rewriting the majority of title tags anyway, and our breakdown of whether keyword density still matters covers the related myth that a word-count ratio, rather than a hidden meta field, was ever the lever. Alt text sits in a different category again: unlike meta keywords, it has a real, named, current use inside Google Image Search, which our guide to whether alt text still matters covers in full. Not every legacy tag deserves the same verdict. This one does.

Does any of this carry over to AI citations?

Nobody has published a study that tests the meta keywords tag against AI citation rate specifically, so this section is an inference, not a measurement, and we are flagging it as exactly that. The closest thing to evidence is the complete absence of any claim to the contrary: no AI lab or AI-search vendor has stated that ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Google's AI Overviews read the keywords meta tag as a signal, and every major crawler in this space is built on the same HTML-parsing foundations that Google's own ranking systems already ignore the tag through. If the field carries no weight for the search engine whose crawler effectively defined how this tag gets read, there's no reason a newer AI crawler would start weighting it now. That's a reasonable inference from the absence of any counter-claim, not a tested result.

What we could not verify

Yahoo Search reportedly made its own "we don't use this either" statement in October 2009, a month after Google's post, but Yahoo's original blog from that era is no longer live, and the only account we could find was a secondary summary rather than Yahoo's own words, so we are naming it as a secondhand claim rather than a sourced quote. We also could not find any current, dated figure for what share of live websites still populate the field today, the way WebAIM publishes an annual number for missing alt text; without that figure we cannot say how common filling in the tag still is in 2026, only that doing so has no effect either way. And Bing's Frédéric Dubut explicitly declined to rule out future use of the tag in 2020, which leaves a small, genuinely open door we have no evidence Bing has walked through since.

A check worth running this week

1. Stop paying anyone, in time or money, to "optimize" your meta keywords tag. There is no search engine on record using it as a ranking input today, and the two that have discussed it both describe it as either unused or actively associated with spam detection.
2. If a template auto-fills the field and removing it costs real developer time, leave it. It is dead weight, not a liability. Spend the time on something that actually moves a result instead.
3. If you are evaluating a freelancer or tool that lists "keyword meta tag optimization" as a line item, ask what effect they can point to. There is no citable source, Google's or Bing's, that gives them one to defend.

Sources

Google's original 2009 position comes from Matt Cutts, Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web search ranking, Google Webmaster Central Blog, 21 September 2009. Google's current, live policy comes from Meta tags and attributes that Google supports, Google Search Central documentation, accessed November 2026. Bing's 2011 statement from Duane Forrester and its evolution through 2014 and 2020 come from The Meta Keywords Tag Lives At Bing, And Why Only Spammers Should Use It, Search Engine Land, October 2011, and Bing Won't Rule Out The Meta Keywords Tag, Search Engine Roundtable, 1 June 2020. The Google News news_keywords tag deprecation comes from Google News Meta Keywords Tag Hasn't Been Supported Since October 2017, Search Engine Roundtable, 20 February 2018. John Mueller's 2023 on-camera statement and the 2012 Matt Cutts quote come from Does Google Use The Meta Keywords Tag For Rankings? No It Does Not, Search Engine Roundtable, 1 September 2023.

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