Hi everyone,
I'm hoping someone familiar with Vercel Edge behavior can help explain a contradiction we've been investigating for several weeks.
Project:
Google Search Console reports that several public pages are excluded because Googlebot Smartphone received:
X-Robots-Tag: noindex
One example is:
https://homeinthe.city/pt/imoveis/porto-alegre/parkview
Search Console reports:
- Last crawl: July 24, 2026
- Crawled as: Googlebot Smartphone
- Page fetch: Successful
- Indexing allowed: No, 'noindex' detected in 'X-Robots-Tag' HTTP header
However, we cannot reproduce this.
We have verified the page in multiple independent ways:
- Local terminal
curl -I https://homeinthe.city/pt/imoveis/porto-alegre/parkview
Result: HTTP 200 No X-Robots-Tag header.
- Googlebot user agent
curl -I -A "Googlebot" https://homeinthe.city/pt/imoveis/porto-alegre/parkview
Result: HTTP 200 No X-Robots-Tag header.
- Independent external check
We tested the same URL using httpstatus.io from an external server.
Result: HTTP 200 No redirects No X-Robots-Tag header.
- HTML
The page HTML contains no robots meta tag and no noindex directive.
- Code audit
The repository has been audited.
There is:
- no vercel.json adding headers
- no Next.js headers() configuration
- no middleware or proxy adding X-Robots-Tag
- no application code emitting this header
During troubleshooting, the Vercel AI assistant mentioned that outdated production deployments may automatically receive an X-Robots-Tag: noindex header after a newer deployment has been promoted.
My questions are:
- Can someone confirm whether this behavior exists?
- Could Googlebot have reached an older production deployment that automatically served this header, even though the current deployment no longer does?
- Is there any way for a Hobby user to verify whether that happened?
- Has anyone seen Google Search Console report an X-Robots-Tag that could no longer be reproduced from the live deployment?
I'm not looking for general SEO advice. I'm specifically trying to understand how Google could report an X-Robots-Tag header that cannot be reproduced today from the current deployment, either locally or from an independent external service.
Thanks in advance.