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Upload this file to your website root: https://yoursite.com/robots.txt
A robots.txt file is a plain text file placed in your website’s root directory that instructs web crawlers which pages or sections they can or cannot access. It’s part of the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP), a standard that all major search engines and responsible bots respect.
Properly configured robots.txt files serve several important SEO purposes: they prevent indexing of duplicate or thin content, protect sensitive pages from appearing in search results, conserve crawl budget for large websites, and now — increasingly — control which AI systems can scrape your content for training data.
Crawl budget refers to how many pages Google will crawl on your site within a given timeframe. For large websites with thousands of pages, crawl budget becomes a real constraint. By blocking low-value URLs (search result pages, filter combinations, duplicate pages), you free up crawl budget for the pages that actually matter for SEO.
Since 2023, a new category of robots.txt directives has emerged: blocking AI training bots. Companies like OpenAI (GPTBot), Anthropic (ClaudeBot), and Google (Google-Extended for Gemini training) have all released named crawlers that can be selectively blocked. Many content publishers are now choosing to block these bots to prevent their content from being used to train competing AI systems without compensation.
The most dangerous robots.txt error is accidentally blocking your entire site with Disallow: / for Googlebot. This can completely remove your site from Google’s index. Always test changes in Google Search Console before deploying. Other common mistakes: forgetting to update robots.txt after site restructuring, and blocking CSS/JS files.
https://yourwebsite.com/robots.txt. For WordPress sites, use SEO plugins like Yoast or Rank Math to manage robots.txt through the dashboard.We review your robots.txt, sitemap, crawl budget, and 200+ other technical SEO factors.
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