Robots.txt Checker

A robots.txt file is a text file placed in the root directory of a website that tells web crawlers (like Googlebot) which pages or sections they can or cannot access. It follows the Robots Exclusion Protocol standard and is one of the first files crawlers check when visiting your site.

No, it's not required. If you don't have a robots.txt file, search engines will crawl all accessible pages on your site. However, having one is strongly recommended because it lets you specify your sitemap location, block unnecessary pages from crawling, and optimize your crawl budget.

Robots.txt blocks crawling - it prevents search engines from accessing the page. Noindex blocks indexing - it allows crawling but tells search engines not to show the page in results. Important: If a page is blocked by robots.txt, crawlers can't see the noindex tag, so the page might still appear in search results (showing just the URL without a snippet).

Robots.txt must be in the root directory of your domain. For example: https://example.com/robots.txt. It won't work in subdirectories. For subdomains, each needs its own robots.txt (e.g., https://blog.example.com/robots.txt).

Google caches robots.txt for up to 24 hours. You can request a refresh in Google Search Console under the robots.txt tester tool. For critical changes, submit the updated robots.txt URL through Search Console for faster processing. Other search engines may have different caching periods.

Yes, Googlebot supports wildcards. Use * to match any sequence of characters and $ to mark end-of-URL. Examples: Disallow: /*.pdf$ blocks all PDFs, Disallow: /page?* blocks URLs with query parameters. Note: Not all crawlers support wildcards.

Googlebot does not respect the Crawl-delay directive. To control Google's crawl rate, use Google Search Console's Crawl Rate Settings instead. Other crawlers like Bingbot and Yandex do respect Crawl-delay. This is why our robots.txt validator specifically warns about Crawl-delay and Google.

Use this robots.txt checker tool to validate syntax and check for common issues. Additionally, use Google Search Console's robots.txt Tester to test specific URLs against your rules and see how Googlebot interprets them. Regularly monitor your Search Console coverage report for crawling errors.

If robots.txt returns a 4xx error, crawlers assume no restrictions and crawl everything. If it returns a 5xx error, Googlebot may temporarily stop crawling to avoid potentially accessing blocked content. A missing or empty robots.txt is treated as "allow all."

Not reliably. Robots.txt blocks crawling, but if other sites link to a blocked page, Google may still show it in search results (without a snippet). To truly prevent indexing, allow crawling and use a noindex meta tag or X-Robots-Tag header instead. Use robots.txt for crawl budget management, not for hiding content.

Create specific User-agent blocks for each crawler. Rules are applied based on the most specific match. Example: User-agent: Googlebot followed by Disallow: (empty, allows all), then User-agent: * followed by Disallow: / blocks all other bots.

Google limits robots.txt to 500KB (500 kilobytes). Content beyond this limit is ignored. If you need extensive rules, consider consolidating paths, using wildcards, or restructuring your site's URL architecture. Most well-structured sites rarely exceed a few kilobytes.