Robots.txt Generator: Control Search Engine Crawlers

What Is robots.txt?

The robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers which pages they can and cannot access on your website. It lives at the root of your domain (e.g., yoursite.com/robots.txt) and is one of the first files crawlers check.

Why robots.txt Matters for SEO

Crawl budget optimization — direct crawlers to your important pages

Prevent indexing of private or duplicate pages

Block resource-heavy pages from unnecessary crawling

Point crawlers to your sitemap

How to Generate robots.txt

Visit the [Robots.txt Generator](/tools/robots-txt-generator)

Select which user-agents to target (Googlebot, Bingbot, etc.)

Add Allow and Disallow rules for your paths

Include your sitemap URL

Copy the generated file and upload to your site root

Common Rules

Allow All Crawlers

```

User-agent: *

Allow: /

```

Block Admin Pages

```

User-agent: *

Disallow: /admin/

Disallow: /login/

```

Block Specific Bots

```

User-agent: BadBot

Disallow: /

```

Best Practices

Don't block CSS/JS — search engines need them to render pages

Always include a sitemap reference

Test your robots.txt using Google Search Console

Don't rely on it for security — it's a suggestion, not a lock

Frequently Asked Questions

Will robots.txt remove pages from Google?

No, it prevents crawling but not indexing. Use noindex meta tags to remove pages from search results.

Do all bots follow robots.txt?

Legitimate search engine bots follow it. Malicious bots may ignore it entirely.

Where should I place robots.txt?

It must be at the root of your domain: https://yourdomain.com/robots.txt