Robots.txt Generator

A robots.txt file is a text file placed in your website's root directory that tells search engine crawlers which pages or sections of your site they should or shouldn't visit. It's essential for controlling how search engines index your website and protecting sensitive areas from being crawled.

The robots.txt file must be placed in the root directory of your website, accessible at https://yourwebsite.com/robots.txt. Search engines always look for it at this exact location.

"Disallow" prevents crawlers from accessing specified paths, while "Allow" explicitly permits access. Use "Disallow" to block areas like admin panels or private content, and "Allow" to override broader Disallow rules for specific subdirectories.

The "*" user-agent is a wildcard that applies rules to all web crawlers and search engine bots. You can also specify individual user agents like "Googlebot" or "Bingbot" to create different rules for different crawlers.

Yes, including your sitemap URL in robots.txt helps search engines discover and crawl your content more efficiently. Add "Sitemap: https://yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml" to point crawlers to your XML sitemap.

Crawl delay specifies the minimum number of seconds between crawler requests to your server. Use it if your server has limited resources or if you're experiencing performance issues due to aggressive crawling. Be cautious as it can slow down indexing.

While robots.txt can discourage legitimate search engines from crawling your site, it's not a security measure. Malicious bots may ignore robots.txt, and the file itself is publicly accessible. For true access control, use server-level restrictions or password protection.

Use wildcard patterns in the path field. For example, "Disallow: *.pdf" blocks all PDF files, "Disallow: /images/*.jpg" blocks JPG images in the images directory. The tool supports standard wildcard syntax.

Each user-agent section applies to the specified crawler. If a bot matches multiple sections, it follows the most specific match. The tool automatically groups rules by user-agent to create proper formatting.

You can test your robots.txt file using Google Search Console's robots.txt Tester tool, or by accessing your site's robots.txt URL directly in a browser. The tool generates standards-compliant format that should work with all major search engines.

Yes, you can add comments by starting lines with the "#" symbol. Comments are useful for documenting your rules and making the file more maintainable. However, this tool focuses on generating functional directives.

Common mistakes include: using the wrong file location, forgetting the trailing slash in directory paths, using "Disallow: /" which blocks everything, not specifying a user-agent, and using relative URLs for sitemaps. This tool helps avoid these issues by generating properly formatted output.