The meta keywords tag: 3 of 27 homepages still ship one
The meta keywords tag is not dead everywhere. On 2026-08-21, 3 of 27 homepages still shipped one and a third of those shipped it empty, while Google documents that it has no effect at all.
FIELD TEST · 2026-08-21 · 27 homepages · single crawl · head parsed
Sample and method: the same 30-site panel in use since 2026-08-15, each homepage fetched once on 2026-08-21 with a browser user agent. Every <meta> element in the delivered HTML was indexed by its name, property or http-equiv, and the value of any name="keywords" recorded verbatim.
Three of 27 homepages still ship a meta keywords tag, and one of those three ships it empty. Google's documentation states the tag has no effect on indexing or ranking at all, which has been true long enough that the surprising number here is three rather than zero.
How we measured it
One HTTP request per site, no rendering, no retries, and the inclusion rule fixed before the run: status 200, body at least 10,000 bytes, body containing <body. Three of the 30 failed it — stackoverflow.com and medium.com returned 403, www.reddit.com returned an 8,393-byte shell — leaving 27 homepages carrying a median of 19 named meta elements each.
The three that still ship a meta keywords tag
Two carry real content and one carries an empty string. All three also ship a meta description, so this is not a case of an old tag standing in for a missing new one.
| Site | Terms | Length | What is in it |
|---|---|---|---|
| www.nytimes.com | 11 | 132 chars | news, live updates, latest news, breaking news, local news, current events, top stories, livestream, live video, world news, us news |
| www.canva.com | 5 | 111 chars | online design website, graphic design software, free online design software, free design media and templates, Canva |
| www.wired.com | 0 | 0 chars | the attribute is present and the value is an empty string |
Canva writes its list without spaces after the commas, which is how a template concatenates a list rather than how a person types one. Wired's empty tag is the most telling of the three: something in the stack is still emitting the element, and nothing is left to fill it.
What Google says the tag does
Nothing. From "Meta tags and attributes that Google supports" on Google Search Central, last updated 2025-12-10 and read 2026-08-21: "The meta-keyword tag is not used by Google Search, and it has no effect on indexing and ranking at all."
The same page enumerates what it does support, and the list is short enough to keep in your head.
| Supported by Google | What it controls |
|---|---|
description | The snippet text Google may show |
robots / googlebot | Crawling and indexing behaviour |
notranslate | Whether translated results are offered |
nopagereadaloud | Text-to-speech |
google-site-verification | Ownership in Search Console |
viewport | Mobile rendering |
refresh, rating, charset | Redirects, SafeSearch labelling, encoding |
A tag that does nothing also costs nothing to keep. That is the whole reason it is still on three of these pages.
What these homepages ship instead
The head is not empty on the sites that dropped the keywords tag. It is full of things that are read.
| Element | Sites |
|---|---|
viewport | 27 / 27 |
description | 26 / 27 |
keywords with content | 2 / 27 |
keywords present at all | 3 / 27 |
The median homepage in this panel names 19 meta elements. Only one of those 19 is the tag people still argue about, and it is on three pages. The lengths and habits of the one that does get read are measured in the meta description length survey, and the one that actually changes crawler behaviour is in the meta robots tag survey.
What this crawl cannot tell you
We looked at homepages. A site can drop the tag on its homepage while a plugin keeps emitting it across ten thousand article pages, and this measurement would not see that. Three of 27 is a homepage number and nothing more.
We do not know whether any AI answer engine reads the tag. Google documents ignoring it; no other engine we are aware of has published a statement either way, and we did not test it. Anyone telling you it helps with AI citations is guessing, and so would we be.
And presence tells you nothing about intent. Wired's empty value could be a deliberate placeholder or a template that lost its data source years ago. From the outside those look identical.
What to do with yours
The honest answer is that this is a low-stakes decision. Two checks, then move on.
- If your CMS emits the tag, leave it or delete it — Google states it has no effect either way, so pick whichever is less work.
- Spend the attention on the description instead. It is the head element with a documented, visible consequence.
- Do not stuff it with search terms you want to rank for. That is the practice the tag was retired for, and it buys nothing.
Knowing which head elements are actually read, and which are decoration, is the part QueryWin is being built around.
Common questions
How did you measure this?
One homepage request per site on 2026-08-21, every <meta> element indexed by name, and any name="keywords" value recorded verbatim. No rendering, no retries.
Is the meta keywords tag still used?
Not by Google, which states in its own documentation that it has no effect on indexing and ranking at all. Three of 27 homepages in this panel still ship one.
Should I remove the meta keywords tag?
You can. Removing it changes nothing in Google, and keeping it changes nothing either. The only real cost of keeping it is that someone will eventually spend an afternoon filling it in.
Do AI search engines read meta keywords?
We do not know, and we did not test it. No engine we are aware of has published a statement about that tag, so treat any claim in either direction as unsupported.
