Turn on Allow search engine indexing to let search engines like Google, and AI answer engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity, find and list your community's public Pages, Resources and Events. It's off by default, and content only members can see is never opened to search engines.
How to turn it on
- Go to Settings > Community > General.
- In the Branding section, turn on Allow search engine indexing.
- Click Save Changes.
The change can take up to an hour to apply.
What it changes
With the setting on:
- Your public Pages, Resources and Events can appear in Google and other search results.
- Your community gets a sitemap listing them, which you can submit in Google Search Console. It's at yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml on a custom domain, or app.heartbeat.chat/your-community/sitemap.xml if you don't use one.
- If you use a custom domain, links to your Pages, Resources and Events can show a preview on LinkedIn and other apps that follow a site's crawler rules. See What do my links show when I share them on social media?
With it off, all your pages stay out of search results. On a custom domain, crawlers are kept out completely, including LinkedIn's link previews.
What search engines can see
Search engines see what a logged-out visitor sees. For a paid or email-gated Resource, that's its public page, not the documents inside. They can't read your feed, posts, Channels, Courses or member profiles.
Your community's main URL and your Sign Up Links stay closed to search engines even with the setting on. To get found on Google, publish a Page and share or submit its link.
AI training crawlers such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended and CCBot are blocked whether the setting is on or off. The setting only opens your public pages to services that search the web or answer people's questions.
Frequently Asked Questions
Google Search Console says my page is blocked by robots.txt. What do I do? Turn on Allow search engine indexing and wait up to an hour. Then open the page in Search Console's URL Inspection tool and click Request indexing. If the blocked URL is your community's main URL, submit one of your Pages instead.
I turned it on, but LinkedIn still can't show a preview. Wait up to an hour, then paste the link into LinkedIn's Post Inspector and click Inspect so LinkedIn fetches it again. Only links to Pages, public Resources and Events can show a preview on LinkedIn.
Can I keep one Page out of search results and show the others? Not at the moment. The setting covers all your public Pages, Resources and Events.
Can I set a separate title, description or image for a Page? Not at the moment. Pages use your community's name, description and Splash image. Resources and Events use their own.