The keyword tag was popularized by search engines such as Infoseek and AltaVista in 1996 and its popularity quickly grew until it became one of the most commonly used META tags. By late 1997, however, search engine providers realised that information stored in META tags, especially the keyword tag, could be unreliable and misleading, and at worst, could be used to draw users into spam sites. (Unscrupulous webmasters could easily place false keywords into a META tag in order to draw people to their site, whether the content match these keywords or not.)

Search engines began dropping support for META keywords in 1998, and by the early 2000s, most search engines had veered away from reliance on meta elements, and in July 2002 AltaVista, one of the last major search engines to still offer support, finally stopped including them.

Newer search engines like Google and FAST have never had any support for the META keywords tag.