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Robots.txt Tester

Fetch and parse any site's robots.txt, test whether a specific path is blocked for a specific crawler, and catch rules that hide your pages from Google. Free, no signup.

What robots.txt does — and doesn't do

robots.txt tells crawlers which paths they may fetch. It does not remove pages from the index — a blocked URL can still be indexed from links pointing at it, showing a bare "no information available" result. To keep a page out of results, use a noindex directive and make sure the page isn't blocked, so crawlers can actually see it. This tester fetches any site's robots.txt, parses the groups correctly (including multi-agent groups, which many parsers get wrong), and gives a verdict for any path and user-agent using the same longest-match rule Google applies.

Common mistakes it catches

A stray Disallow: / that blocks the whole site; rules in the wrong group so Googlebot isn't covered; a missing Sitemap: line; and blanket blocks on AI crawlers you may actually want citing you. Verify the sitemap it declares with the sitemap checker, then run a full page check to see what crawlers find once they're allowed in.

Frequently asked questions

It tells crawlers which paths they may or may not fetch. It does not remove pages from Google's index — a blocked page can still be indexed from links. Use noindex for that, and make sure the page isn't blocked so the noindex can be seen.

No, but every site should serve one deliberately — even a permissive default — so crawl behavior is explicit. A missing file means crawlers assume everything is allowed; a malformed one can accidentally block your whole site.

Yes — GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and others honor robots.txt rules addressed to their user-agent. Whether you should block them is a strategy question: being cited in AI answers is a growing discovery channel.