Crawlability Checker

Assess accessibility for search engines and AI crawlers.

What is the Crawlability Checker?

Your robots.txt file controls which search engines and AI crawlers can access your site. A misconfigured robots.txt can accidentally block Google from indexing your pages — or let AI bots scrape your content without permission. This tool reads robots.txt and shows exactly what's allowed and blocked.

How to Use

  1. Enter a domain to fetch and parse its robots.txt file
  2. See which crawlers are allowed, blocked, or have custom rules
  3. Check specific AI bot access (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, etc.)
  4. Review sitemap references declared in robots.txt

Why This Matters for SEO

A single robots.txt mistake can deindex your entire site. We've seen sites accidentally block Googlebot with a wildcard rule, losing all organic traffic overnight. Conversely, allowing all AI crawlers means your content may be used to train models without compensation.

Tips & Best Practices

  • Never block Googlebot or Bingbot unless you intentionally want to deindex pages
  • Use specific disallow rules instead of wildcards to avoid accidental blocks
  • Block crawl-heavy paths like /search, /filter, or paginated archives
  • Decide your AI crawler policy — block GPTBot/ClaudeBot if you want to protect content
  • Test changes with Google Search Console's robots.txt tester before deploying

Frequently Asked Questions

What is robots.txt?
Robots.txt is a text file at your domain root that tells search engine crawlers which pages they can and cannot access. Crawlers check it before scanning your site.
Should I block AI crawlers?
It depends on your content strategy. Blocking GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and similar AI crawlers prevents your content from being used for AI training. Blocking them doesn't affect your Google rankings.

Related Free SEO Tools

When This Tool Pays Off

Single-purpose tools like this one are most valuable in three moments of a typical SEO workflow. The first is right after you publish or update a page — running a quick check catches small mistakes (a missing tag, an oversized snippet, a forgotten redirect) before Google sees them. The second is during a focused audit, when you're working through a list of pages and need a fast, consistent diagnostic. The third is during competitive research: running the same tool against competing pages tells you where the gaps are.

Free tools like this one are deliberately narrow. They answer one question fast, with no signup or daily limit. That makes them great for spot checks but tedious as a long-term workflow. If you find yourself running the same set of tools every week against the same domain, that's the moment the full PageSEO weekly plan saves you time — same data, prioritized, on a schedule, with the actual action you should take next instead of a stack of metrics.

Privacy & Limits

Every tool on this site runs against public URLs. We don't store the URL you submit beyond the request itself, and there are no accounts, no email signups, and no daily quotas. The tools are rate limited per IP to keep the service available for everyone, but casual use never hits the limits. If a tool fails on a specific URL, the most common reason is the page is behind authentication or blocking automated crawlers via robots.txt — try the URL in an incognito window to confirm it's actually publicly reachable.