Independent technical utility
About Robots.txt Tools
Robots.txt Tools helps site owners create, validate, check, and test robots.txt rules without treating crawler control as a collection of copy-and-paste snippets. The tools are designed around the Robots Exclusion Protocol, search-engine documentation, and reproducible rule behavior.
What we build
The site focuses narrowly on robots.txt: generation, validation, live checking, URL testing, examples, and platform-specific starting points. It is not a general SEO suite and does not require an account for the core tools.
How results are produced
Generator, Validator, and pasted-rule Tester logic runs in the browser. The Checker makes a server-side request only when you ask it to inspect a public website's live /robots.txt file.
How technical guidance is verified
Protocol behavior is checked against RFC 9309. Google-specific behavior and crawler-specific controls are separated from protocol rules and checked against official provider documentation when a primary source is available.
What the tools do not promise
robots.txt controls compliant crawling; it is not authentication, it does not guarantee de-indexing, and a preset is never automatically correct for every website. Important URLs should be tested before and after publishing changes.
Robots.txt Tools Editorial Team
Protocol behavior is checked against RFC 9309. Google-specific behavior and crawler-specific controls are separated from protocol rules and checked against official provider documentation when a primary source is available.
Examples are written as starting points rather than universal SEO prescriptions. When standards behavior and a provider-specific implementation differ, the site labels that distinction instead of presenting every warning as a syntax error.
Editorial and product principles
Examples are written as starting points rather than universal SEO prescriptions. When standards behavior and a provider-specific implementation differ, the site labels that distinction instead of presenting every warning as a syntax error.
Crawler names and provider policies can change. Material changes to AI-search or AI-control crawler guidance are reviewed against the provider's current documentation before the affected guidance is updated.
Reproducible parser bugs and incorrect technical claims are treated as product defects. The goal is to fix shared logic and explanations at the source rather than patch one page while leaving inconsistent behavior elsewhere.
Start with the task you have
Technical references
Rules and crawler-specific guidance are checked against primary standards and provider documentation rather than copied from other SEO tools.
- RFC 9309
Robots Exclusion Protocol syntax, matching, grouping, and percent-encoding behavior.
- Google robots.txt specification
Google-specific robots.txt behavior and supported fields.
- OpenAI crawler controls
OAI-SearchBot and GPTBot crawler purposes and controls.
- Anthropic crawler controls
ClaudeBot, Claude-SearchBot, and Claude-User crawler behavior.
- Perplexity robots.txt guidance
PerplexityBot indexing behavior and robots.txt compliance.
- Google-Extended documentation
Google-Extended Gemini training and grounding controls.