One of the cornerstones of Google's business (and really, the web at large) is the robots.txt file that sites use to exclude some of their content from the search engine's web crawler, Googlebot. It ...

Columnist Glenn Gabe shares his troubleshooting process for identifying issues with robots.txt that led to a long, slow drop in traffic over time. I’ve written many times in the past about how ...

Are large robots.txt files a problem for Google? Here's what the company says about maintaining a limit on the file size. Google addresses the subject of robots.txt files and whether it’s a good SEO ...

In this example robots.txt file, Googlebot is allowed to crawl all URLs on the website, ChatGPT-User and GPTBot are disallowed from crawling any URLs, and all other crawlers are disallowed from ...

Google LLC is pushing for its decades-old Robots Exclusion Protocol to be certified as an official internet standard, so today it open-sourced its robots.txt parser as part of that effort. The REP, as ...

A featured WebmasterWorld thread has examples of issues with Google possibly disobeying the robots.txt file. GoogleGuy and VanessaFox both come in, to offer some guidance on the perceived issue.

This lack of enforcement has fueled a new problem: third-party scrapers. When publishers explicitly try to block AI companies, they simply create a market for third-party services that boast about ...