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Free Robots.txt Checker

Updated March 2026 · 4 min read

Your robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers which pages to index and which to ignore. A misconfigured robots.txt can accidentally block Google from indexing your entire site — and you wouldn't know unless you checked. Similarly, a missing or broken sitemap means Google has to discover your pages by crawling links, which is slower and less reliable.

Our free robots.txt checker fetches your robots.txt file, validates its syntax, checks for common errors, and verifies that your sitemap is accessible. No signup required.

What the tool checks

• Robots.txt exists — verifies that /robots.txt returns a 200 status and contains valid content.
• Syntax validation — checks for invalid directives, malformed rules, and common typos.
• Disallow rules — shows exactly what you're blocking from crawlers. Flags dangerous rules like Disallow: / which blocks your entire site.
• Sitemap reference — checks if your robots.txt includes a Sitemap: directive pointing to your XML sitemap.
• Sitemap accessibility — fetches the sitemap URL and verifies it returns valid XML with a 200 status.
• Sitemap URL count — shows how many URLs are in your sitemap so you can verify it matches your expectations.

Common robots.txt mistakes

• Blocking the entire site — Disallow: / blocks all crawlers from all pages. Often left over from development or staging environments that were pushed to production.
• Blocking CSS and JS — older guidance suggested blocking /wp-content/ or /assets/. Google now needs to render your CSS and JavaScript to evaluate page experience. Blocking these hurts your rankings.
• No sitemap reference — without a Sitemap: line, Google has to guess where your sitemap is. Adding it takes 10 seconds and ensures Google finds every page you want indexed.
• Wrong sitemap URL — the sitemap URL in robots.txt returns a 404, either because the file doesn't exist or the URL has a typo.

Single file check vs full site audit

This tool checks your robots.txt and sitemap specifically. For a comprehensive audit that also checks every page for SEO issues, broken links, speed problems, and 80+ other checks — run a full SiteBeat scan.