Free SEO Tool
Robots.txt Checker
Analyze your robots.txt crawl directives, verify sitemap references, and identify issues blocking important content.
Understand your robots.txt better
These guides explain how to fix the issues this tool uncovers.
Monitor crawl health and access rules?
Rank SEO watches your robots.txt configuration, sitemap references, and crawlability status. Catch crawler blocking issues early.
I'll show you exactly what's holding your SEO back and how to fix it.
Frequently Asked Questions
robots.txt is a file at the root of your website (like example.com/robots.txt) that tells search engine crawlers which paths they can and cannot access. It allows you to control crawl behavior, preserve crawl budget for important pages, and point crawlers to your XML sitemap.
Not required, but highly recommended. If you do not have a robots.txt file, search engines will crawl everything they can find. A robots.txt file gives you explicit control over crawl behavior and helps search engines discover your sitemap without manual submission.
No. robots.txt blocks crawling, but not indexing. If Google discovers a URL through external links but cannot crawl it due to robots.txt, it may still list the URL in search results without a snippet. Use the noindex meta tag to prevent indexing.
Yes. Including a Sitemap directive in your robots.txt is a best practice that helps search engines automatically discover and prioritize your XML sitemap. This reduces the need to manually submit your sitemap to Google Search Console.
A Disallow rule tells crawlers not to access a specific path. For example, Disallow: /admin/ blocks all URLs starting with /admin/. An empty Disallow (just the word Disallow with no path) means nothing is blocked for that user-agent, and the crawler can access everything.