Robots.txt Monitoring

What is robots.txt Monitoring?

robots.txt Monitoring in SEOTesting automatically watches your site's robots.txt file, stores every version, and alerts you the moment anything changes.
It's part of SEOTesting's Website Monitor, a low-touch set of tools that watch the files search engines read first.

Why use robots.txt Monitoring?

Accidental robots.txt changes are surprisingly common. A staging config shipped to production, a developer blocking a directory, or a CMS update quietly rewriting the file - any of these can change how search engines crawl your site without anyone realising. Because Search Console reporting lags behind, you might not see the effect for a week or more.

Monitoring your robots.txt means you get the answer to "what changed, and when?" before a ranking drop turns up. This is useful for:

• Catching accidental blocks - spot a Disallow: / pushed by mistake before Google recrawls the site.
• Migrations and replatforms - confirm robots.txt rules carry over correctly when a site moves CMS or host, with a full audit trail if anything goes wrong.
• Client and agency work - know within hours when a client's developer ships a change that rewrites robots.txt, instead of finding out after the organic dip.
• Diagnosis - prove to a dev team that a traffic drop started the day a specific rule was added.

Where to find robots.txt Monitoring

From the Launchpad, select the website at the top of the page that you wish to monitor, then from the left-hand menu select 'Monitor'.

Under 'Website Configuration' where it says 'Robots.txt, click on 'View Report':

Here you will be able to see every version of your robots.txt:

You can pick any two dates in the 'Compare' and 'with' options on the top right of the page - this will show you exactly which lines were added, modified, or removed, side by side.

To see further details on any of the changes, click 'Show/hide' to expand.

Email alerts on every change

You get notified the moment your robots.txt changes, so you can review it, roll it back, or raise a ticket before it affects crawling.

Visibility across every site you manage

Whether you manage ten sites or a hundred, every website in your account is monitored automatically, with all changes surfaced in one place.

Updated on: 12/08/2026