Free tool

robots.txt Tester

One line in robots.txt can hide your entire site from Google. This tester fetches your robots.txt, checks it for a sitewide crawl block, and confirms your XML sitemap is declared.

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The fatal pattern

A "Disallow: /" under "User-agent: *" blocks every crawler from every page. It is the standard staging-site setting, and it reaches live sites far more often than you would expect.

Crawling is not indexing

robots.txt controls crawling, not indexing. A blocked URL can still appear in results with no description. To keep a page out of search entirely, allow crawling and use a noindex meta tag instead.

Declare your sitemap

Adding a Sitemap: line to robots.txt is a free, one-line way to help search engines discover every page you want indexed.

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Run the full 35-point audit.

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