Free tools

robots.txt generator

A valid robots.txt, with the AI crawlers listed explicitly. Free and no account. Nothing leaves your browser.

Google ignores this directive entirely. Bing and Yandex honour it.

Training crawlers

Blocking these keeps your content out of model training. It does not affect whether assistants cite you.

Retrieval crawlers

Blocking these removes you from AI answers. Most people who block them did not mean to.

robots.txt

User-agent: *
Allow: /
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /api/
Disallow: /cart
Disallow: /*?s=

Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml

Save this as robots.txt at the root of your domain. Note that it controls crawling and not indexing: a disallowed URL can still appear in results if other sites link to it. Use a noindex meta tag to keep a page out of the index.

What it tells you

  • Separates training from retrieval crawlers

    The distinction almost nobody explains, and the one that decides whether blocking a bot costs you anything.

  • Every AI crawler named

    GPTBot, Google-Extended, ClaudeBot, CCBot, OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot, each with what it actually does.

  • Standard directives too

    Disallow paths, a sitemap line, and an optional crawl delay with a note on who honours it.

  • Copy and paste

    Valid output, ready for the root of your domain.

How to use it

  1. 1Set your sitemap and disallow pathsAdmin areas, carts and internal search results are the usual candidates.
  2. 2Decide about AI crawlersRead the two groups carefully. Blocking training crawlers costs you nothing today; blocking retrieval crawlers removes you from AI answers.
  3. 3Copy to your domain rootIt must live at yourdomain.com/robots.txt. Anywhere else and it is ignored.

Questions people ask

Should I block GPTBot?

It depends what you are protecting. GPTBot collects training data, so blocking it keeps your writing out of future models and costs you nothing in visibility. It is not the crawler that fetches your page when ChatGPT answers a question: that is OAI-SearchBot. People block both and then wonder why they are never cited.

Does blocking Google-Extended hurt my search rankings?

No. Google-Extended controls Gemini training only and is separate from Googlebot. Blocking it has no effect on Google Search crawling, indexing or ranking, which Google states directly.

Does robots.txt stop a page being indexed?

No, and this is the most common misunderstanding. It controls crawling. A disallowed URL can still appear in results if other sites link to it, usually with no description. To keep a page out of the index, allow the crawl and use a noindex meta tag, because a blocked page cannot be read to discover the noindex.

Where does the file go?

The root of the domain, at yourdomain.com/robots.txt, served as plain text. A robots.txt in a subdirectory is ignored, and each subdomain needs its own.

Does crawl delay work?

Bing and Yandex honour it. Google ignores it entirely and you set the crawl rate in Search Console instead.

Other free tools

Want a tool like this on your own domain?

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