At One Place

robots.txt generator

Build a robots.txt with crawler rules, AI bot access and a sitemap line.

How it works

Produces a robots.txt from a few choices, including whether to allow AI crawlers such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and CCBot.

The most important thing to understand about robots.txt is what it does not do. It requests that a crawler not fetch a URL; it does not prevent indexing. A page blocked in robots.txt can still appear in results if other pages link to it, because the crawler never fetches it and therefore never sees a noindex tag. To keep a page out of an index you need a noindex meta tag or X-Robots-Tag header — and the page must be crawlable for that to be read.

That combination catches people constantly: blocking a URL in robots.txt and adding noindex to the page achieves nothing, because the noindex is never seen.

robots.txt is public and advisory. Anyone can read it, and badly-behaved crawlers ignore it entirely, so it is not a security measure and should never list paths you want kept private.

This tool runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you enter is sent to a server, logged or stored, and the page keeps working with the network disconnected.

Common questions

Does robots.txt stop a page being indexed?
No. It asks crawlers not to fetch the page. A blocked page can still be indexed from external links, and its noindex tag will never be read because the page is never fetched.
How do I actually keep a page out of Google?
A noindex meta tag or X-Robots-Tag header, on a page that is crawlable. Blocking it in robots.txt prevents the noindex from being seen.
Should I allow AI crawlers?
It depends on your goals. Allowing them makes your content quotable in AI answers; blocking them keeps it out of training and retrieval. It is a business decision, not a technical one.

Related pages

Sources

  1. Typical range compiled from manufacturer specifications — At One Place

How these figures are compiled and checked