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Robots.txt - Glossary | MDN 1/3 https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Robots.txt reference web, html, css, javascript, documentation 2026-05-05T05:43:04.860870+00:00 kb-cron

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  1. Glossary
  2. Robots.txt

Robots.txt

A robots.txt is a file that is usually placed in the root of a website (for example, https://www.example.com/robots.txt). It specifies whether or not crawlers are allowed access to an entire website, or to specified resources. A restrictive robots.txt file can prevent bandwidth consumption by crawlers. A site owner can forbid crawlers to detect a certain path (and all files in that path) or a specific file. This is often done to prevent these resources from being indexed or served by search engines. If a crawler is allowed to access resources, you can define indexing rules for those resources via <meta name="robots"> elements (commonly referred to as a "robots tag") and X-Robots-Tag HTTP headers. Search-related crawlers use these rules to determine how to index and serve resources in search results, or to adjust the crawl rate for specific resources over time.

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