Robots.txt Generator
Generate a valid robots.txt file for your website to control search engine crawling.
About Robots.txt Generator
A robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers which pages of your website they can and cannot access. Correctly configured robots.txt files are essential for technical SEO — they prevent Googlebot from wasting crawl budget on admin pages, staging areas, and duplicate content. Our free robots.txt generator creates a valid, ready-to-deploy robots.txt file with support for multiple user agents, custom disallow and allow rules, crawl delay settings, and your sitemap URL. No signup required.
Robots.txt Complete Guide for SEO
What Is a Robots.txt File?
A robots.txt file is a plain text file placed in the root of your website (yourdomain.com/robots.txt) that tells search engine crawlers which pages they are allowed to crawl and index. It is the first file Google reads when it visits your site. Every website should have one — even if it simply allows all crawlers access to all pages.
Robots.txt vs Noindex: What Is the Difference?
This is one of the most misunderstood distinctions in SEO. Robots.txt tells Google not to crawl a URL. Noindex tells Google not to index a URL. These are completely different:
- A page blocked in robots.txt can still appear in Google results if other pages link to it — Google knows the URL exists even without crawling it.
- A page with a noindex tag is crawled but excluded from search results — the most reliable way to prevent a page from appearing in Google.
- Use robots.txt to protect resources (admin pages, internal search results, staging paths). Use noindex to hide pages from results while still allowing Google to follow links on them.
Common Robots.txt Directives Explained
User-agent: *— Applies the rules to all search engine bots.User-agent: Googlebot— Applies rules only to Google's crawler.Disallow: /admin/— Blocks crawling of the entire /admin/ directory.Disallow: /— Blocks crawling of the entire site. Use only on staging environments — never on your live site.Allow: /public/— Overrides a Disallow rule for a specific subfolder.Sitemap: https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml— Tells Google where to find your sitemap.
Crawl Budget: Why Robots.txt Matters for Large Sites
Google allocates a crawl budget to each site — the number of pages it will crawl in a given period. For small sites (under 200 pages), crawl budget is rarely a concern. For large e-commerce or news sites with thousands of pages, blocking low-value URLs (pagination pages, filter combinations, internal search results) in robots.txt ensures Google spends its crawl budget on your most important pages instead of wasting it on duplicates.
What Pages Should You Disallow?
- Admin and login pages (
/admin/,/wp-admin/) - Internal search result pages (
/search?q=) - Shopping cart and checkout pages
- User account pages
- Staging or test directories
- Duplicate content (print versions, sort/filter URL parameters)
After generating your robots.txt file, submit your sitemap to Google Search Console and link it in the Sitemap line of your robots.txt. Check your existing site crawl data in our robots.txt SEO guide for more detailed configuration examples.