Robots.txt Tester

The robots.txt tester analyzes a site's robots.txt policy for a given path and user-agent. Target users include SEO professionals, web administrators, and developers performing crawl policy audits or migrations. It identifies whether a path is allowed or blocked and surfaces the exact directive that governs access, enabling remediation before indexing. Use cases include pre-launch audits, migrations, and automated monitoring of crawl policies across domains.
Core operation: fetch robots.txt from site_url, partition directives by user-agent groups, and evaluate the test path against the applicable rules. The evaluation uses the longest matching directive within the most specific user-agent group to decide allowed vs disallowed. Outputs include allowed (true/false), matched_rule, and rule_type. Optional data such as crawl_delay and sitemap directives can be surfaced for deeper policy understanding.
Core differentiators include explicit matched-rule reporting, handling of common wildcard patterns, and deterministic default behavior when no rule matches. Use cases include validating access during site launches, ensuring critical paths are crawlable, auditing against crawler-specific requirements, and integrating checks into CI pipelines. The tool adheres to standard robots.txt semantics and provides clear results across domains.
Error handling and reliability: if robots.txt is missing or unreachable, the tool treats access as allowed by default and records the condition for evaluation. In case of parsing errors or malformed directives, it falls back to safe defaults and returns partial results with diagnostic hints to guide remediation.