robots.txt Generator — Free Online Tool

A robots.txt generator helps you create a correct robots.txt file to guide search engine crawlers. SWEDevTools: Prism generates robots.txt rules for a specific user-agent, supports allow/disallow paths, optional crawl-delay, and an optional sitemap URL line. Use it to block admin areas, keep staging sites out of crawlers, or document crawler behavior — all generated locally in your browser as plain text.

Features

Frequently Asked Questions

Does robots.txt prevent indexing?

robots.txt controls crawling, not necessarily indexing. To prevent indexing, also use noindex headers/meta where appropriate and ensure pages aren’t publicly linked.

Where do I place robots.txt?

At the root of your site: https://example.com/robots.txt (not inside a subfolder).

How do Allow and Disallow interact?

Rules are evaluated by crawlers with their own precedence rules; generally, a more specific Allow can override a broader Disallow for a given bot.

How do I block all crawlers?

Use User-agent: * and Disallow: /. This blocks crawling site-wide, which is common for staging environments but not recommended for production.

Should I add a sitemap URL?

If you have a sitemap.xml, adding it is a good idea. It helps crawlers discover canonical URLs faster.

Can I define multiple user-agent sections?

This generator focuses on one user-agent section at a time. If you need multiple, generate each section and combine them into one robots.txt file.

Is Crawl-delay supported everywhere?

Not uniformly. Some crawlers ignore Crawl-delay. If you need real rate limiting, use server-side throttling and caching.

Do you validate my paths or sitemap URL?

The tool generates text output; you should validate the result by requesting /robots.txt in your deployed environment and testing in Search Console equivalents.

What happened to smalldev.tools?

smalldev.tools is no longer available. Prism by SWEDevTools offers the same developer tools and more, with offline support, pipeline chaining, and completely free usage — no signup required.