How Google interprets the robots.txt specification

Google's automated crawlers support the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP). This means that before crawling a site, Google's crawlers download and parse the site's robots.txt file to extract information about which parts of the site may be crawled. The REP isn't applicable to Google's crawlers that are controlled by users (for example, feed subscriptions), or crawlers that are used to increase user safety (for example, malware analysis).

This page describes Google's interpretation of the REP. For the original draft standard, check the IETF Data Tracker. If you're new to robots.txt, start with our intro to robots.txt. You can also find tips for creating a robots.txt file and an extensive list of frequently asked questions and their answers.

What is a robots.txt file

If you don't want crawlers to access sections of your site, you can create a robots.txt file with appropriate rules. A robots.txt file is a simple text file containing rules about which crawlers may access which parts of a site.

File location and range of validity

You must place the robots.txt file in the top-level directory of a site, on a supported protocol. In case of Google Search, the supported protocols are HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP. On HTTP and HTTPS, crawlers fetch the robots.txt file with an HTTP non-conditional GET request; on FTP, crawlers use a standard RETR (RETRIEVE) command, using anonymous login.

The rules listed in the robots.txt file apply only to the host, protocol, and port number where the robots.txt file is hosted.

The URL for the robots.txt file is (like other URLs) case-sensitive.

Examples of valid robots.txt URLs

Robots.txt URL examples
http://example.com/robots.txt	Valid for: http://example.com/ http://example.com/folder/file Not valid for: http://other.example.com/ https://example.com/ http://example.com:8181/ This is the general case. It's not valid for other subdomains, protocols, or port numbers. It's valid for all files in all subdirectories on the same host, protocol, and port number.
http://www.example.com/robots.txt	Valid for: http://www.example.com/ Not valid for: http://example.com/ http://shop.www.example.com/ http://www.shop.example.com/ A robots.txt on a subdomain is only valid for that subdomain.
http://example.com/folder/robots.txt	Not a valid robots.txt file. Crawlers don't check for robots.txt files in subdirectories.
http://www.exämple.com/robots.txt	Valid for: http://www.exämple.com/ http://xn--exmple-cua.com/ Not valid for: http://www.example.com/ IDNs are equivalent to their punycode versions. See also RFC 3492.
ftp://example.com/robots.txt	Valid for: ftp://example.com/ Not valid for: http://example.com/
http://212.96.82.21/robots.txt	Valid for: http://212.96.82.21/ Not valid for: http://example.com/ (even if hosted on 212.96.82.21) A robots.txt with an IP-address as the host name is only valid for crawling of that IP address as host name. It isn't automatically valid for all websites hosted on that IP address (though it's possible that the robots.txt file is shared, in which case it would also be available under the shared host name).
http://example.com:80/robots.txt	Valid for: http://example.com:80/ http://example.com/ Not valid for: http://example.com:81/ Standard port numbers (80 for HTTP, 443 for HTTPS, 21 for FTP) are equivalent to their default host names.
http://example.com:8181/robots.txt	Valid for: http://example.com:8181/ Not valid for: http://example.com/ Robots.txt files on non-standard port numbers are only valid for content made available through those port numbers.

Handling of errors and HTTP status codes

When requesting a robots.txt file, the HTTP status code of the server's response affects how the robots.txt file will be used by Google's crawlers.

Handling of errors and HTTP status codes
2xx (successful)	HTTP status codes that signal success prompt Google's crawlers to process the robots.txt file as provided by the server.
3xx (redirection)	Google follows at least five redirect hops as defined by RFC 1945 and then stops and treats it as a 404 for the robots.txt. This also applies to any disallowed URLs in the redirect chain, since the crawler couldn't fetch rules due to the redirects. Google doesn't follow logical redirects in robots.txt files (frames, JavaScript, or meta refresh-type redirects).
4xx (client errors)	Google's crawlers treat all 4xx errors as if a valid robots.txt file didn't exist, which means crawling without restrictions. This includes 401 (unauthorized) and 403 (forbidden) HTTP status codes.
5xx (server error)	Because the server couldn't give a definite response to Google's robots.txt request, Google temporarily interprets server errors as if the site is fully disallowed. Google will try to crawl the robots.txt file until it obtains a non-server-error HTTP status code. A 503 (service unavailable) error results in fairly frequent retrying. If the robots.txt is unreachable for more than 30 days, Google will use the last cached copy of the robots.txt. If unavailable, Google assumes that there are no crawl restrictions. If you need to temporarily suspend crawling, we recommend serving a 503 HTTP status code for every URL on the site. If we are able to determine that a site is incorrectly configured to return 5xx instead of a 404 status code for missing pages, we treat the 5xx error from that site as a 404. For example, if the error message on a page that returns a 5xx status code is "Page not found", we would interpret the satus code as 404 (not found).
Other errors	A robots.txt file which cannot be fetched due to DNS or networking issues, such as timeouts, invalid responses, reset or interrupted connections, and HTTP chunking errors, is treated as a server error.

Caching

Google generally caches the contents of robots.txt file for up to 24 hours, but may cache it longer in situations where refreshing the cached version isn't possible (for example, due to timeouts or 5xx errors). The cached response may be shared by different crawlers. Google may increase or decrease the cache lifetime based on max-age Cache-Control HTTP headers.

File format

The robots.txt file must be a UTF-8 encoded plain text file and the lines must be separated by CR, CR/LF, or LF.

Google ignores invalid lines in robots.txt files, including the Unicode Byte Order Mark (BOM) at the beginning of the robots.txt file, and use only valid lines. For example, if the content downloaded is HTML instead of robots.txt rules, Google will try to parse the content and extract rules, and ignore everything else.

Similarly, if the character encoding of the robots.txt file isn't UTF-8, Google may ignore characters that are not part of the UTF-8 range, potentially rendering robots.txt rules invalid.

Google currently enforces a robots.txt file size limit of 500 kibibytes (KiB). Content which is after the maximum file size is ignored. You can reduce the size of the robots.txt file by consolidating directives that would result in an oversized robots.txt file. For example, place excluded material in a separate directory.

Syntax

Valid robots.txt lines consists of a field, a colon, and a value. Spaces are optional, but recommended to improve readability. Space at the beginning and at the end of the line is ignored. To include comments, precede your comment with the # character. Keep in mind that everything after the # character will be ignored. The general format is <field>:<value><#optional-comment>.

Google supports the following fields:

• user-agent: identifies which crawler the rules apply to.
• allow: a URL path that may be crawled.
• disallow: a URL path that may not be crawled..
• sitemap: the complete URL of a sitemap.

The allow and disallow fields are also called directives. These directives are always specified in the form of directive: [path] where [path] is optional. By default, there are no restrictions for crawling for the designated crawlers. Crawlers ignore directives without a [path].

The [path] value, if specified, is relative to the root of the website from where the robots.txt file was fetched (using the same protocol, port number, host and domain names). The path value must start with / to designate the root and the value is case-sensitive. Learn more about URL matching based on path values.

user-agent

The user-agent line identifies which crawler rules apply to. See Google's crawlers and user-agent strings for a comprehensive list of user-agent strings you can use in your robots.txt file.

The value of the user-agent line is case-insensitive.

disallow

The disallow directive specifies paths that must not be accessed by the crawlers identified by the user-agent line the disallow directive is grouped with. Crawlers ignore the directive without a path.

Google can't index the content of pages which are disallowed for crawling, but it may still index the URL and show it in search results without a snippet. Learn how to block indexing.

The value of the disallow directive is case-sensitive.

Usage:

disallow: [path]

allow

The allow directive specifies paths that may be accessed by the designated crawlers. When no path is specified, the directive is ignored.

The value of the allow directive is case-sensitive.

Usage:

allow: [path]

sitemap

Google, Bing, and other major search engines support the sitemap field in robots.txt, as defined by sitemaps.org.

The value of the sitemap field is case-sensitive.

Usage:

sitemap: [absoluteURL]

The [absoluteURL] line points to the location of a sitemap or sitemap index file. It must be a fully qualified URL, including the protocol and host, and doesn't have to be URL-encoded. The URL doesn't have to be on the same host as the robots.txt file. You can specify multiple sitemap fields. The sitemap field isn't tied to any specific user agent and may be followed by all crawlers, provided it isn't disallowed for crawling.

For example:

user-agent: otherbot
disallow: /kale

sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml
sitemap: https://cdn.example.org/other-sitemap.xml
sitemap: https://ja.example.org/テスト-サイトマップ.xml

Grouping of lines and rules

You can group together rules that apply to multiple user agents by repeating user-agent lines for each crawler.

For example:

user-agent: a
disallow: /c

user-agent: b
disallow: /d

user-agent: e
user-agent: f
disallow: /g

user-agent: h

In this example there are four distinct rule groups:

• One group for user agent "a".
• One group for user agent "b".
• One group for both "e" and "f" user agents.
• One group for user agent "h".

For the technical description of a group, see section 2.1 of the REP.

Order of precedence for user agents

Only one group is valid for a particular crawler. Google's crawlers determine the correct group of rules by finding in the robots.txt file the group with the most specific user agent that matches the crawler's user agent. Other groups are ignored. All non-matching text is ignored (for example, both googlebot/1.2 and googlebot* are equivalent to googlebot). The order of the groups within the robots.txt file is irrelevant.

If there's more than one specific group declared for a user agent, all the rules from the groups applicable to the specific user agent are combined internally into a single group. User agent specific groups and global groups (*) are not combined.

Examples

Matching of user-agent fields

user-agent: googlebot-news
(group 1)

user-agent: *
(group 2)

user-agent: googlebot
(group 3)

This is how the crawlers would choose the relevant group:

Group followed per crawler
Googlebot News	googlebot-news follows group 1, because group 1 is the most specific group.
Googlebot (web)	googlebot follows group 3.
Googlebot Images	googlebot-images follows group 2, because there is no specific googlebot-images group.
Googlebot News (when crawling images)	When crawling images, googlebot-news follows group 1. googlebot-news doesn't crawl the images for Google Images, so it only follows group 1.
Otherbot (web)	Other Google crawlers follow group 2.
Otherbot (news)	Other Google crawlers that crawl news content, but don't identify as googlebot-news follow group 2. Even if there is an entry for a related crawler, it is only valid if it's specifically matching.

Grouping of rules

If there are multiple groups in a robots.txt file that are relevant to a specific user agent, Google's crawlers internally merge the groups. For example:

user-agent: googlebot-news
disallow: /fish

user-agent: *
disallow: /carrots

user-agent: googlebot-news
disallow: /shrimp

The crawlers internally group the rules based on user agent, for example:

user-agent: googlebot-news
disallow: /fish
disallow: /shrimp

user-agent: *
disallow: /carrots

Rules other than allow, disallow, and user-agent are ignored by the robots.txt parser. This means that the following robots.txt snippet is treated as one group, and thus both user-agent a and b are affected by the disallow: / rule:

user-agent: a
sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml

user-agent: b
disallow: /

When the crawlers process the robots.txt rules, they ignore the sitemap line. For example, this is how the crawlers would understand the previous robots.txt snippet:

user-agent: a
user-agent: b
disallow: /

URL matching based on path values

Google uses the path value in the allow and disallow directives as a basis to determine whether or not a rule applies to a specific URL on a site. This works by comparing the rule to the path component of the URL that the crawler is trying to fetch. Non-7-bit ASCII characters in a path may be included as UTF-8 characters or as percent-escaped UTF-8 encoded characters per RFC 3986.

Google, Bing, and other major search engines support a limited form of wildcards for path values. These are:

• * designates 0 or more instances of any valid character.
• $ designates the end of the URL.

Example path matches
/	Matches the root and any lower level URL.
/*	Equivalent to /. The trailing wildcard is ignored.
/$	Matches only the root. Any lower level URL is allowed for crawling.
/fish	Matches any path that starts with /fish. Matches: /fish /fish.html /fish/salmon.html /fishheads /fishheads/yummy.html /fish.php?id=anything Doesn't match: /Fish.asp /catfish /?id=fish /desert/fish Note: Matching is case-sensitive.
/fish*	Equivalent to /fish. The trailing wildcard is ignored. Matches: /fish /fish.html /fish/salmon.html /fishheads /fishheads/yummy.html /fish.php?id=anything Doesn't match: /Fish.asp /catfish /?id=fish
/fish/	Matches anything in the /fish/ folder. Matches: /fish/ /animals/fish/ /fish/?id=anything /fish/salmon.htm Doesn't match: /fish /fish.html /Fish/Salmon.asp
/*.php	Matches any path that contains .php. Matches: /index.php /filename.php /folder/filename.php /folder/filename.php?parameters /folder/any.php.file.html /filename.php/ Doesn't match: / (even if it maps to /index.php) /windows.PHP
/*.php$	Matches any path that ends with .php. Matches: /filename.php /folder/filename.php Doesn't match: /filename.php?parameters /filename.php/ /filename.php5 /windows.PHP
/fish*.php	Matches any path that contains /fish and .php, in that order. Matches: /fish.php /fishheads/catfish.php?parameters Doesn't match: /Fish.PHP

Order of precedence for rules

When matching robots.txt rules to URLs, crawlers use the most specific rule based on the length of its path. In case of conflicting rules, including those with wildcards, Google uses the least restrictive rule.

The following examples demonstrate which rule Google's crawlers will apply on a given URL.

Sample situations
http://example.com/page	allow: /p disallow: / Applicable rule: allow: /p, because it's more specific.
http://example.com/folder/page	allow: /folder disallow: /folder Applicable rule: allow: /folder, because in case of matching rules, Google uses the least restrictive rule.
http://example.com/page.htm	allow: /page disallow: /*.htm Applicable rule: disallow: /*.htm, because it matches more characters in the URL, so it's more specific.
http://example.com/page.php5	allow: /page disallow: /*.ph Applicable rule: allow: /page, because in case of matching rules, Google uses the least restrictive rule.
http://example.com/	allow: /$ disallow: / Applicable rule: allow: /$, because it's more specific.
http://example.com/page.htm	allow: /$ disallow: / Applicable rule: disallow: /, because the allow rule only applies on the root URL.