What is Robots.txt Generator?
The Robots.txt Generator is a free tool that helps you create a correctly formatted robots.txt file for your website. The robots.txt file is a plain text file placed at the root of your domain (example.com/robots.txt) that instructs web crawlers — such as Googlebot, Bingbot, and other search engine spiders — which parts of your site they are allowed or disallowed from accessing. It follows the Robots Exclusion Protocol, a standard that has been in use since 1994 and is respected by all major search engines. The file uses a simple syntax of User-agent, Allow, Disallow, Crawl-delay, and Sitemap directives. Despite the simplicity, mistakes in robots.txt can have severe consequences: a misplaced wildcard can accidentally block your entire site from being indexed. This generator provides a guided interface that prevents common errors and produces a valid file you can upload to your server immediately.
Why Use Robots.txt Generator?
Every website should have a robots.txt file, even if it allows full access to all crawlers. Without one, crawlers log 404 errors when they request /robots.txt, which wastes crawl budget and pollutes your server logs. More importantly, robots.txt gives you fine-grained control over what gets crawled. You can block crawlers from admin panels, staging environments, duplicate content sections, internal search result pages, and other areas that add no value to search indexes. This reduces wasted crawl budget — the limited number of pages a search engine will crawl on your site in a given period. For large sites with thousands of pages, efficient crawl budget management is critical for ensuring important pages get indexed quickly. A malformed robots.txt file, however, can do more harm than good. A single typo can block your homepage or your entire /blog/ directory. The Robots.txt Generator eliminates this risk by constructing the file through a structured interface with validation at every step.
How to Use
Begin by selecting which user agents (crawlers) you want to create rules for. The most common choice is a wildcard (*) rule that applies to all crawlers, but you can add specific rules for Googlebot, Bingbot, or any other bot. For each user agent, add Disallow directives for paths you want to block — for example, /admin/, /private/, or /search?q=. You can also add Allow directives to create exceptions within blocked directories. If you want to slow down aggressive crawlers, set a Crawl-delay value in seconds. Finally, add your sitemap URL so crawlers can discover it directly from robots.txt. The generator validates your input, warns about potentially dangerous rules (like blocking the root path), and outputs a properly formatted text file. Copy the contents and save them as robots.txt in your website's root directory.
Example Usage
Consider an e-commerce site running on example-store.com. You want all crawlers to access product and category pages but need to block the admin dashboard at /admin/, the customer account area at /account/, internal search at /search, and faceted navigation URLs that create duplicate content at /collections?sort= and /collections?filter=. Using the generator, you set User-agent to *, add Disallow rules for /admin/, /account/, /search, and /collections?sort=, then add a Sitemap directive pointing to https://example-store.com/sitemap.xml. The generator produces a clean robots.txt file. You might also add a separate block for Googlebot-Image with Disallow: /private-images/ to prevent Google from indexing certain product photos. Upload the file to your web root and verify it works using Google Search Console's robots.txt Tester.
Benefits
The Robots.txt Generator provides several important benefits. It prevents syntax errors that could accidentally block search engines from your most important pages. It offers a visual interface that is far easier to work with than editing raw text, especially for users unfamiliar with the robots exclusion standard. The built-in validation catches common mistakes like blocking the root path or forgetting to include a sitemap directive. It supports multiple user-agent blocks so you can create differentiated rules for different crawlers. The generator also includes helpful presets for common platforms like WordPress, Shopify, and Next.js, giving you a head start based on your tech stack. And because it runs in your browser, your site structure information is never transmitted to any external server.