Robots.txt Generator — Control Search Engine Crawling
A correctly configured robots.txt file tells search engines which parts of your site to crawl — and which to leave alone.
The robots.txt file, placed at the root of your domain (e.g., example.com/robots.txt), gives instructions to search engine crawlers about which URLs they're allowed to access. A misconfigured robots.txt can accidentally block search engines from indexing your entire site — or fail to protect pages you don't want indexed.
Our Robots.txt Generator helps you build a correctly formatted robots.txt file, specifying rules for different user agents (crawlers), disallowed paths, and your sitemap location.
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Open Robots.txt Generator →How to Use the Robots.txt Generator
- Open the Robots.txt Generator tool.
- Specify which user agents (e.g., all bots, or specific ones like Googlebot) the rule applies to.
- Add paths you want to disallow (block from crawling) or explicitly allow.
- Add your sitemap URL so crawlers can find it easily.
- Copy the generated robots.txt content and upload it to the root of your website (e.g., yoursite.com/robots.txt).
Common Use Cases
- Blocking search engines from crawling admin areas, login pages, or staging environments.
- Pointing crawlers to your XML sitemap for more efficient discovery of your pages.
- Preventing duplicate content issues by disallowing crawling of filtered or sorted URL variants.
- Setting different crawl rules for different bots (e.g., allowing Googlebot but blocking aggressive scrapers).
- Quickly generating a basic robots.txt for a new website launch.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does robots.txt prevent pages from being indexed?
Not necessarily — robots.txt primarily controls crawling (whether a bot fetches the page), not indexing. A page can still be indexed if it's linked from elsewhere, even if crawling is disallowed. To prevent indexing, use a 'noindex' meta tag or HTTP header instead.
Where should robots.txt be placed?
It must be placed at the root of your domain, accessible at https://yourdomain.com/robots.txt — placing it in a subdirectory will not work.
Can robots.txt block specific bots only?
Yes, you can specify rules for individual user agents (like 'Googlebot' or 'Bingbot') separately from a general wildcard rule ('*') that applies to all other bots.
Is robots.txt mandatory for every website?
No, it's not strictly required — if absent, most crawlers will assume they're allowed to crawl everything. However, having one gives you explicit control and is considered good practice.
Related Tools
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