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site.robots-txt-error

WarningSEO auditcrawl

robots.txt returned a server error or could not be fetched. Google treats 5xx robots.txt as "do not crawl anything".

What to change

Make /robots.txt return 200 (or 404 if you have none).

The documentation on developers.google.com

A finding of this rule on a page carries the exact edits for that page: the markup it quotes, and what to write instead.

When it runs

Runs on a crawl or a build directory. A warning is a problem that costs a page ranking, clicks or citations. Each finding takes 5 points off the page's score.

The severity here is the rule's usual one: a finding can be raised or lowered when the page gives a reason.

Run it, or skip it

Check a page for this rule alone, after a fix for instance:

npx @rivi-software/agentic-seo-check crawl https://example.com --rule site.robots-txt-error

Or from an assistant, with the MCP tool seo_crawl_site:

{
  "url": "https://example.com",
  "rules": [
    "site.robots-txt-error"
  ]
}

To leave it out of an audit, pass --disable site.robots-txt-error on the command, or disableRules: ["site.robots-txt-error"] to a tool.

All 49 rules