Robots.txt Generator

Disallowing a URL in robots.txt stops crawling, but if the URL is already linked from elsewhere, Google can still show it in results as a bare link with no snippet, because it never fetched the page to know what's on it. If your goal is to keep a page out of search results entirely, use a noindex meta tag or header on the page itself and let it be crawled so the directive is actually seen.

You can target specific bots with their own User-agent block, such as separating Googlebot from an aggressive scraper, and each block needs its own Disallow and Allow lines since crawlers do not inherit rules from a wildcard block once a more specific block matching their name exists.

Always include a Sitemap line pointing to your sitemap.xml at the bottom of the file; it costs nothing and gives crawlers a direct path to your full URL list instead of relying purely on discovery through links.

A stray Disallow: / left over from a staging environment, deployed to production, will block crawling of the whole domain. Always test the generated file against Google Search Console's robots.txt report after publishing, and double check any wildcard pattern before pushing it live.

A growing number of site owners want to allow Googlebot and Bingbot while restricting bots used for AI training or aggressive scraping. This means adding separate User-agent blocks by exact name, since a generic wildcard Disallow would also cut off the search crawlers you actually depend on for visibility, and bot names change over time so this list needs occasional review.

Sites with filterable listings, like e-commerce category pages with size and color parameters, can generate near-infinite URL combinations that waste crawl budget on duplicate content. Disallowing common parameter patterns, such as anything containing ?sort= or &filter=, keeps crawlers focused on canonical pages instead of spending their budget on thousands of near-identical variants.