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Robots.txt Tester

Fetch and parse robots.txt, and check nothing important is blocked.

Free, no signup. We fetch the page once and read what your server sends back.

Fetching the page…

What this checks

robots.txt controls which crawlers may request which paths. A single misplaced line can remove an entire site from search, and because nothing visibly breaks, it can sit there for months.

  • Whether robots.txt exists
  • Every Allow and Disallow rule with its user agent
  • Sitemap directives
  • Whether the whole site is blocked

How to act on the result

  • Disallow: / under User-agent: * blocks everything. Check this first after any launch.
  • Declare your sitemap here so crawlers find it without guessing.
  • Blocking CSS and JS stops Google rendering your page as users see it.

Frequently asked

Does robots.txt stop a page being indexed?

No, and this catches people out. It stops crawling, not indexing. A blocked page with inbound links can still appear in results with no description. Use a meta robots noindex to keep a page out.

Do I need a robots.txt file?

Not strictly. Without one everything is crawlable, which is usually what you want. It is still worth having for the sitemap directive.

Should I block AI crawlers here?

A genuine decision with a real trade-off. Publishers often do. Businesses wanting to be recommended by AI assistants generally should not. Our AI crawler checker tests what your server actually does, which is often not what robots.txt says.

Why is my staging site in Google?

Usually because robots.txt blocked crawling but the site was linked from somewhere, so it got indexed without being crawled. Password protection is the only reliable fix.

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