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Live diagnostic

robots.txt Tester

Fetch and parse any site's robots.txt — see the rules, sitemaps, and test whether a path is crawlable. Free, no signup.

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One stray Disallow can hide a whole section of your site from search. This tester reads the live robots.txt and splits it into the groups and rules crawlers actually follow. Type in a path and it tells you whether that page is reachable, so the pages you want indexed stay reachable and the ones you don’t stay blocked.

How it works

  1. 01

    Enter a site URL

    Paste any URL on the site — Sitewell reads the robots.txt from that origin's root for you.

  2. 02

    Read the rules

    See each user-agent group with its Allow/Disallow rules and every sitemap the file declares.

  3. 03

    Test a path

    Type a path and a crawler name to check whether that page is crawlable under the current rules.

Frequently asked questions

What does the robots.txt tester check?
It fetches the robots.txt file at the root of the domain, then breaks it down into its user-agent groups, the Allow and Disallow rules under each, and any Sitemap lines. You can also type a path and a crawler name to see whether that page would be crawled.
How does the path checker decide allowed or blocked?
It follows the same longest-match rule Google uses: the rule with the most specific (longest) matching path wins, and when an Allow and a Disallow tie, the Allow takes priority. A path with no matching rule is treated as crawlable.
Does blocking a page in robots.txt remove it from Google?
No. robots.txt stops compliant crawlers from fetching a page, but a blocked URL can still appear in results if other pages link to it. To keep a page out of the index, use a noindex meta tag or header and leave it crawlable so Google can read that directive.
Where should robots.txt live?
It has to sit at the root of the host — example.com/robots.txt. A robots.txt in a subfolder is ignored, and each subdomain needs its own file. This tester always reads the file from the origin root for you.

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