Syntax & directive validation
Parse User-agent, Allow, Disallow, and Sitemap declarations according to RFC 9309 robots exclusion standards.
CRAWL PERMISSIONS & DIRECTIVES
Robots.txt tester and syntax validator
Test robots.txt directives online, validate crawler rules for Googlebot and Bingbot, and verify URL access before search engine indexing issues occur.
✓ No credit card required
✓ Asynchronous Cloudflare edge crawl
✓ 5 free checks daily
Robots.txt controls search crawler access to your site. Test syntax, verify whether specific URLs are allowed or blocked, and inspect user-agent rule precedence without guessing or waiting for crawl errors.
CAPABILITIES
What you can do
Multi-bot crawl simulation
Simulate crawl access for Googlebot, Bingbot, SerpOrbitBot, or general crawlers (*) against any URL path.
Specific URL path testing
Verify whether login areas, staging folders, search queries, or media paths are properly protected from indexing.
Directive conflict detection
Identify overlapping allow and disallow patterns, wildcard errors, and trailing slash discrepancies.
WORKFLOW
From data to action
- 1
Fetch or paste robots.txt
Enter your domain to pull the live robots.txt automatically, or paste custom directives directly.
- 2
Choose bot and test path
Select a search engine crawler and enter the target URL path you want to test.
- 3
Inspect the access verdict
See instant Allowed or Blocked status along with the exact rule and line number that triggered it.
COMMON TASKS
Validate robots.txt syntax and crawler access online
Test whether specific pages or directory paths are blocked from Googlebot, Bingbot, or other web crawlers before changing live directives.
Test robots.txt disallow rules
Confirm whether sensitive backend directories, faceted navigation parameters, or staging URLs are blocked from web crawlers.
Validate Googlebot crawler access
Verify whether essential CSS, JavaScript, and key content paths are accidentally blocked from Googlebot indexing.
Troubleshoot robots.txt syntax errors
Detect malformed wildcard expressions, misplaced directives, missing sitemap lines, and encoding problems.
SPECIFIC QUESTIONS
Questions this workflow answers
How does the robots.txt tester determine if a URL is allowed or blocked?
SerpOrbit parses the robots.txt directives into User-agent blocks, matches the most specific agent declaration (e.g. Googlebot before *), and evaluates Allow and Disallow paths using RFC 9309 longest-match rules.
Does robots.txt prevent a page from appearing in Google search results?
Not completely. Robots.txt prevents crawling, but if other websites link to the blocked URL, Google may still index the URL without page content. To guarantee de-indexation, use a noindex meta tag on an accessible page.
Can I test draft robots.txt rules before publishing them?
Yes. You can paste proposed robots.txt rules directly into the tester to verify access for different bots and URL paths before deploying them to your live server.