Robots.txt Analyzer
Fetch and analyze robots.txt files for SEO best practices
Fetch Robots.txt
What does a robots.txt file actually do?
robots.txt is a plain-text file at the root of a domain (e.g. example.com/robots.txt) that tells search engine crawlers which parts of a site they're allowed to request. It's a set of instructions, not a security measure — it doesn't hide pages, it just asks well-behaved crawlers not to fetch them.
A misconfigured robots.txt is one of the most common ways sites accidentally block Google from indexing pages they actually want found — a single stray Disallow: / can deindex an entire site. It's also where you point crawlers to your XML sitemap.
This tool fetches your live robots.txt, checks it against common SEO best practices (sitemap declared, no accidental blanket disallows, no blocked CSS/JS that search engines need to render the page), and flags anything that looks like a mistake rather than a deliberate choice.
Frequently asked questions
- Does robots.txt stop pages from appearing in Google?
- Not directly. Disallowing a URL stops Google from crawling it, but the URL can still appear in search results (without a snippet) if other pages link to it. To fully keep a page out of search, use a noindex meta tag instead.
- Why would blocking CSS or JS files hurt SEO?
- Google renders pages like a browser to understand layout and content. If robots.txt blocks the CSS/JS Google needs to render the page, it may misjudge what the page actually looks like or contains.
- Do I need a robots.txt file at all?
- Not strictly — if none exists, crawlers assume everything is allowed. But it's still the standard place to point crawlers to your sitemap and to block low-value paths like admin or checkout pages from being crawled unnecessarily.
- What's WooCommerce mode for?
- It adds checks specific to WooCommerce sites — cart, checkout, and account pages that are commonly left crawlable by mistake and waste crawl budget on pages that should never rank.
Want your robots.txt and crawl budget handled properly? That's what our SEO team does.
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