Feedback board indexing: 2,743 public boards, and which ones search engines are told to skip

Public feedback boards from seventeen tools, read on 3 October 2026 for the one instruction that decides whether a search engine may list them. 1,812 of the 2,743 carried noindex, which asks search engines to leave the page out of their results. Each board is one row in the file below, with its tool, the kind of plan its own record names where the record says, and whether it carried the instruction. No company, board or host is named.

On three of the four tools whose boards carry their plan, the line falls at payment. Canny hid all 623 of its boards that do not pay and none of the 300 that do. Featurebase hid 942 of 991 that do not pay. Frill hid all 56 boards on its trial plan.

id,vendor,plan_kind,plan_record,noindex,noindex_in,own_domain
1,Canny,free,expired,1,tag,0
2,Canny,free,active,1,tag,0
3,Canny,free,expired,1,tag,0

Download the file. It is free to copy, quote and use commercially. To cite it, link https://votefirst.app/en/data/feedback-board-indexing and give the read date, 3 October 2026.

Which tools hide a public board from search?

Five hid more than half of the boards read, and five hid none of them.

Productboard and Fider Cloud send the instruction as an X-Robots-Tag response header, so reading a board's page source alone would miss it. Every other noindex in the file is a tag in the page.

Does a free feedback board show up on Google?

On Canny and Featurebase, almost never. All 523 boards on Canny's free plan carried noindex, and 864 of the 906 on Featurebase Free. Canny's own board code writes the tag whenever a workspace is on the free plan or its subscription is not active, which is laid out with the plan counts on the Canny pricing page.

FeatureOS went the other way. 6 of the 7 boards still on its retired free plan carried no tag.

Tools whose boards do not say their plan cannot be split like this. UserJot has a free plan, and none of its 60 boards read carried the tag.

What happens to a board when its subscription ends?

It usually stays online and drops out of search. All 94 lapsed Canny boards carried noindex: 60 cancelled, 20 expired, 8 still paid up but set to cancel, and 6 overdue on payment. So did 76 of 79 lapsed Featurebase boards and every Frill board on the trial plan, 54 of which reported no trial days left.

FeedBear goes further. 41 boards read "This project is deactivated" in place of the board, and every one of those pages carried noindex.

Are paying boards ever hidden?

Sometimes, and the record does not say why. 63 of 219 paying Featurebase boards carried the tag, against 7 of 63 FeatureOS boards on a paid plan, 2 of 30 Frill boards on Startup, Business or Growth and 1 of 32 on one of Frill's lifetime or AppSumo deals. An owner can switch indexing off, and nothing in the page separates that from a rule the vendor applies.

Productboard is the one case where the address predicts it. All 31 portals at a generated 24 character address sent the block, and none of the 27 named after their company did.

Does a hidden board matter?

Only if you want strangers to find it. A board with noindex still opens for anyone with the link, and a customer you send there sees the same page. What it loses is the visitor who searches for a missing feature by name and could have landed on the request that already asks for it.

A board you keep for existing customers loses nothing. A board you hoped would bring people in does.

How was this built, and when does it change?

The board addresses came from Common Crawl's URL index. For the four tools whose boards carry their plan, that was every subdomain the index lists: 2,138 for Canny, 1,279 for Featurebase, 143 for Frill and 123 for FeatureOS. For the other thirteen it was up to 80 addresses each from the newest crawls, with Productboard's portals counted by path. A list drawn from a crawl leans toward boards that something links to, so this measures the public, linked part of each tool and is not a census.

Each address was read once on 3 October 2026, as a visitor with no sign in. Canny, Featurebase, Frill and FeatureOS send each visitor a record of the workspace's plan inside the page, and a board counts as live when that record came back. For the other thirteen, a board counts as live when its own address answered with a board, and pages that read as deactivated, empty or an error were set apart by their title. FeedBear's deactivated pages stay in the file as rows of their own.

noindex was read from the robots tag in the page and from the X-Robots-Tag response header. On the four plan record tools, the header was read again on every board whose tag allowed indexing, 635 boards in all, and none of them sent one.

plan_kind is the plan the board's own record names. paid is an active paid subscription, using Featurebase's own app code for what counts as paying. free is the free plan, trial a trial, lapsed a subscription cancelled, expired, set to cancel or overdue, deal one of Frill's lifetime and AppSumo deals, and deactivated a FeedBear page that says so. The cell is empty where the tool's record was not read. own_domain is whether the record names a custom domain, and is empty for the same thirteen.

VoteFirst is not in the file, since its boards were not drawn the same way. A published VoteFirst board carries no noindex on either paid plan, and an unpublished one is not served at all.

The next read is due by 1 January 2027.

Who is this dataset for?

Anybody choosing a feedback tool for a board that should bring visitors in, and anybody already running one who wants to know whether it can be found.

The votes on 634 Canny and Featurebase boards are a separate file, and what each tool charges is another.

14 days, a card at signup, then $9 or $39 a month.