$ nuxt-seo tools
Free Robots.txt Validator
Check robots.txt syntax, test a crawler against one path, and review any AI crawler preferences.
How to Check Your Robots.txt
To check your site's robots.txt file, simply append /robots.txt to your domain (e.g., example.com/robots.txt). This file is the first thing search engines look for when visiting your site.
The robots.txt validator reports syntax issues and matched rules. Use the URL tab to fetch a live file or the Paste tab to test changes before deployment.
What to look for:
- Does it exist at the root directory?
- Is there a User-agent declaration for each block?
- Are important assets (CSS/JS) allowed?
- Is your sitemap URL included?
Common Robots.txt Errors
Missing User-agent
Rules like Disallow: /admin/ must be preceded by a User-agent: line, otherwise bots will ignore them.
Relative URLs
Sitemap directives require absolute URLs. Using Sitemap: /sitemap.xml is invalid and will be ignored by search engines.
Blocking Resources
Blocking /_nuxt/ or /assets/ can stop crawlers from loading files needed to render the page.
Path Case Sensitivity
Robots.txt paths are case-sensitive. Disallow: /Admin/ will not block access to /admin/.
Conflicting Rules
Having both Allow: / and Disallow: / for the same agent can lead to unpredictable bot behavior.
AI Bot Blocking in Robots.txt
Crawlers such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and CCBot publish user-agent tokens that sites can address in robots.txt.
The IETF Content-Usage draft and Cloudflare Content-Signal express content-use preferences. Support and enforcement vary by crawler.
IETF Content-Usage
A draft vocabulary for machine-readable content-use preferences.
Content-Usage: search=y, train-ai=nCloudflare Content-Signal
A preference signal for search, AI input, and model training use.
Content-Signal: ai-train=noCommon questions
What does a robots.txt validator check?
A robots.txt validator parses your file for syntax issues and common mistakes in User-agent, Allow, Disallow, and Sitemap directives. This checker also reports Content-Usage and Content-Signal preferences when present.
How do I know if my robots.txt is blocking AI bots?
Enter your site URL, then review the matched robots.txt rule for each listed crawler. A blocked result reports what the file requests; each crawler decides how it handles that request. Content-use preferences are shown separately.
What is the robots.txt syntax?
Each rule block starts with User-agent: followed by the bot name (* for all). Then add Disallow: /path/ to block or Allow: /path/ to permit access. Rules are case-sensitive for paths. Add Sitemap: URL at the end to reference your sitemap. Lines starting with # are comments.
Why is Google still crawling pages I blocked?
Google generally caches robots.txt for up to 24 hours. Fetch errors can extend caching, so live rules may differ from its cached copy. A Disallow rule controls crawling, but does not prevent indexing from external links. Use authentication to prevent access. To keep a crawlable page out of search, use noindex.
How do I test if a specific URL is blocked?
After validating your robots.txt, use the path tester feature to check any URL against your rules. Enter a path like /admin/ and select a user-agent to see if it would be blocked or allowed based on your current rules.
Is a robots.txt checker the same as a robots.txt validator?
The terms overlap. This checker parses common robots.txt syntax, reports issues it recognizes, and lets you test one crawler and path against the parsed rules.
Validated your robots.txt. Nuxt SEO Pro shows which pages are actually crawled and indexed, with Search Console built in.
Part of Nuxt SEO . One install covers sitemaps, robots.txt, meta tags, Schema.org, and OG images.
References
Learn More
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Robots.txt Guide
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