Public and private links
Which share links search engines may index, how a document becomes public or private, and what the share page shows a crawler.
Every EveryPage share link opens for anyone who has it. Whether search engines may also list it is a separate, per-document setting, and the plan decides the starting point.
What the plan decides
| Plan | New documents start | Can change it |
|---|---|---|
| Free, and uploads without an account | Public: search engines may index the share page | No |
| Basic and Pro | Private: search engines are told not to list it | Yes, per document |
This applies to documents uploaded from 10 November 2026. Every document that existed before then stays private, whatever the plan.
A document keeps its setting when the plan changes. Moving from Pro to Free does not publish anything: a document that was private stays private (and a Free owner cannot make it public). A document an owner made public stays public after a downgrade, too.
Paid plans on trial terms count as their plan: a Basic or Pro trial's uploads start private.
Changing it
Open the document's Configure & share page, then the Privacy & Access tab. Under Search engines, switch Let search engines index this document on or off. The change applies to the next crawl. On Free the switch is shown but cannot be changed.
Through the API, the same control is the searchPublic field on PUT /api/v1/files/{uuid}/settings (see API keys and the OpenAPI description); the document record reports both searchPublic (your setting) and searchIndexable (whether a crawler is told to index it right now).
What keeps a public document out of the index
A public document is only listed while nothing stands between a reader and the first page. While any of these is set, search engines are told not to index it, and the Privacy tab says so:
- a password
- an email gate (with or without a lead-capture form)
- a view limit
- a page range
An expired, burned or deleted document is never listed, nor is a document paused for review, nor any document whose owner's account is suspended. Hosted HTML sites are never listed. Per-recipient link variants and embed URLs are never listed either: only the document's own share link can be.
What a crawler sees
The share page of a public document carries an index robots directive, a canonical link to its share address (on everypage.link, or on your custom domain), and a plain-text version of the document's title, page count, description and first-page preview for crawlers that do not run JavaScript. It also carries the "Shared with EveryPage" link, which Free documents always show. The share host publishes a sitemap of public documents at https://everypage.link/sitemap.xml.
Every other share page carries noindex in its page and in its response headers.
Readership is unaffected: a search visitor is a reader like any other, and the share page never reveals who else has read the document.
Search engines keep their own copies
Search engines index on their own schedule. After a public document is made private, expires or is deleted, it can stay in results until the engine next visits and sees the change; EveryPage cannot remove it from an engine's index. If timing matters, set the document private before sharing it widely, or use a Basic or Pro plan, where new documents start private.