Robots.txt Generator

Build a robots.txt file visually — configure crawl rules for search engines, block specific directories, and add your sitemap URL. Download ready to upload.

What Is robots.txt?

The robots.txt file is a plain text file placed at the root of your website (e.g. https://example.com/robots.txt) that tells search engine crawlers which pages or directories they are allowed or not allowed to crawl. It follows the Robots Exclusion Protocol. While robots.txt is a courtesy — crawlers are not required to obey it — all major search engines (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo) respect it by default.

Key robots.txt Directives

User-agent specifies which bot the rule applies to. * applies to all bots. Googlebot applies only to Google's crawler. Disallow blocks a path from being crawled. Allow explicitly permits a path (useful when a parent is disallowed). Sitemap tells crawlers where to find your XML sitemap — a significant SEO signal. Crawl-delay asks bots to wait N seconds between requests (not honoured by Google).

Important Limitations

Blocking a URL with robots.txt does not prevent it from appearing in search results if other pages link to it — Google may still index the URL but cannot read the content. To prevent indexing, use a noindex meta tag on the page itself. Also, sensitive data should never be protected only by robots.txt — it is not a security mechanism, just a crawl instruction.

Place robots.txt at the root of your domain — https://yourdomain.com/robots.txt. For Netlify, put it in the root of your published folder. For WordPress, most SEO plugins manage it automatically. Test it at https://search.google.com/search-console/robots-testing-tool.
Yes — blocking crawlers from crawling pages means Google can't read their content to rank them. Accidentally blocking important pages is a common SEO mistake. Only block pages you genuinely don't want indexed: admin panels, duplicate content, staging pages, internal search results.
You can. Common AI crawlers to block: GPTBot (OpenAI), Google-Extended (Google AI training), CCBot (Common Crawl), anthropic-ai, Claude-Web. Use Disallow: / under each User-agent to block them. Note: not all AI crawlers respect robots.txt.