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site.robots-txt-invalid-rule

WarningSEO auditcrawl

robots.txt has lines crawlers cannot use: an Allow or Disallow path that starts with neither / nor * (a full URL included), which matches no URL; an Allow or Disallow above the first User-agent line, which belongs to no group; or a Sitemap that is not a full URL, which search engines ignore.

What to change

Start every Allow and Disallow path with / (Disallow: /wp-admin/, not wp-admin/ or https://example.com/wp-admin/), put every rule under a User-agent line, and write each Sitemap line as a full URL (Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml).

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-invalid-rule

Or from an assistant, with the MCP tool seo_crawl_site:

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

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

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