Fetch and review any live website's current robots.txt file.
Fetched live through a CORS-enabled relay directly from the domain's own /robots.txt file.
Robots.txt Checker fetches the live, currently-published robots.txt file from any domain and displays it along with a quick summary — how many Disallow rules it contains and whether it references a sitemap — so you can audit exactly what a site is currently telling search crawlers, without needing to open a new tab and navigate there yourself.
The tool requests /robots.txt directly from the target domain through a CORS-enabled relay, since plain-text files served without explicit CORS headers usually can't be read cross-origin by JavaScript running on a different domain. The raw file contents are then displayed exactly as published, along with a lightweight parse that counts Disallow directives and checks for a Sitemap reference.
Before crawling, scraping data, or building an integration against another site, checking its robots.txt is the polite, standard first step to understand what that site's owner has explicitly asked automated tools not to access. SEOs auditing a client's site (or a competitor's, for research) use this to quickly confirm nothing important is being accidentally blocked from search engines. Developers debugging "why isn't Google indexing my new page" issues often find the answer sitting directly in an overly broad Disallow rule.
A high Disallow count isn't inherently good or bad — it depends entirely on what's being blocked. Seeing Disallow: / under User-agent: * is a major red flag, since it blocks the entire site from all crawlers. A missing Sitemap directive isn't an error, but adding one is a quick win for crawl discovery. If no file is found at all, the site currently has no crawl restrictions in place — which is the default, permissive state.
Yes — robots.txt is a public file specifically designed to be read by any crawler or tool; checking it is standard, expected practice.
It means the site hasn't published any crawl restrictions, so by default, crawlers assume they can access the entire site.
Yes — it's a good habit to re-check right after editing robots.txt to confirm the live version matches what you intended to publish, especially after a deployment.
It shows you the raw rules — cross-reference the Disallow paths listed against your own site's key URLs to confirm nothing important is unintentionally blocked.
Site owners sometimes want stricter or looser rules for specific crawlers — for example, allowing Googlebot full access while restricting a lesser-known bot more heavily.
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