alt.hn

1/19/2026 at 5:03:38 PM

Fix your robots.txt or your site disappears from Google

 https://www.alanwsmith.com/en/37/wa/jz/s1/

by bobbiechen

1/19/2026 at 7:52:23 PM

Google docs are pretty clear (https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/robots-txt/robot...):

> Google's crawlers treat all 4xx errors, except 429, as if a valid robots.txt file didn't exist. This means that Google assumes that there are no crawl restrictions.

This is a better source than a random SEO dude with a channel full of AI-generated videos.

by WmWsjA6B29B4nfk

1/19/2026 at 8:14:09 PM

Not entirely unlikely this is just a bug on Google's end.

It's fairly common for there to be a very long and circuitous route between cause and effect in search, so a bug like this can sometimes be difficult to identify until people start making blog posts about it.

by marginalia_nu

1/19/2026 at 8:26:28 PM

It seems that this is not happening and even the guy who wrote the article mentions it:

> I don't have a robots.txt right now. It hasn't been there in a long time. Google still shows two results when I search for files on my site though:

The source that he links to is another indian spam channel we've seen a thousand times on YouTube

by efilife

1/20/2026 at 10:15:17 AM

It does seem unlikely that Google would have a big in basic behavior of its crawler after ~27 years.

by xnx

1/19/2026 at 8:40:08 PM

Google Adsense docs says that ads.txt is not mandatory and yet I remember having no ads displayed on my website until I added one.

by conradfr

1/20/2026 at 3:44:48 AM

Yeah I thought I got a notification saying to add it for an existing site but it still seemed optional the last time I created a new site?

by jamesfinlayson

1/19/2026 at 11:34:24 PM

Indeed. “Unreachable” is very different than “not found”.

by edwinjm

1/20/2026 at 1:20:42 AM

[dead]

by khana

1/19/2026 at 8:19:53 PM

I remember back in the day, when SEO was a more viable channel, being surprised at how much of the game was convincing Google to crawl you at all.

I naively assumed that they would be happy to take in any and all data, but they had a fairly sophisticated algorithm for deciding "we've seen enough, we know what the next page in the sequence is going to look like." They value their bandwidth.

It led to a lot of gaming of how you optimally split content across high-value pages for search terms (the 5 most relevant reviews should go on pages targeting the New York metro, the next 5 most relevant for LA, etc.)

I'm surprised again, honestly. I kind of assumed the AI race meant that Google would go back to hoovering all data at the cost of extra bandwidth, but my assumption clearly doesn't hold. I can't believe I knew all that about Google and still made the same assumption twice.

by jimberlage

1/19/2026 at 9:31:13 PM

Google may be aggressively crawling for AI and only making a small subset visible to the search database.

by HWR_14

1/19/2026 at 8:23:31 PM

And from the comments below, sounds like they might be aggressively crawling still, but unidentified or with a different crawler identity. So perhaps they are hoovering up everything in the AI era.

by jimberlage

1/19/2026 at 8:21:56 PM

"Here's the video from Google Support that covers it:"

This Google Support is another indian spammer that generates tens of nonsense videos and uploads them to YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LJKNiQJ8LA

This guy is not affiliated with Google in any way other than spamming on their help forums like indian people tend to do

https://www.iskgti.com/

His own website has 92 score in SEO on lighthouse despite his claim he's a "SEO expert"

From the article:

> I don't have a robots.txt right now. It hasn't been there in a long time. Google still shows two results when I search for files on my site though:

guess why

by efilife

1/19/2026 at 7:17:32 PM

Not sure if this is reliable.

- What does "unreachable" mean, exactly? A 404 or some more serious error?

- What is a "Diamond Product Expert" and do they speak for the company?

by skybrian

1/19/2026 at 7:34:01 PM

I agree; I'm calling "incorrect" on this for now, pending corroborating sources. I run a few sites that don't contain a robots.txt file, and they are showing on Google just fine. I see links to the home page and several interior pages; all good.

by larrymcp

1/19/2026 at 8:25:53 PM

Because you can see pages not affected doesn't guarantee they will stay that way.

by dazc

1/20/2026 at 2:06:28 AM

A diamond product expert is a poor sap who freely gave up their time to act as an unpaid stand-in customer support for the richest company on earth.

by wackget

1/20/2026 at 6:58:57 AM

and we have a winner for the coveted "best comment I'm going to read all week" award!

by antisol

1/19/2026 at 7:49:31 PM

Not having a robots.txt is fine as long as it's a 404. If it's a 403, you'll be de-indexed.

I have a feeling there's more to the story than what's in the blog post.

by cj

1/20/2026 at 12:23:37 AM

If there's one thing I know about Google search, it's that there's never one behavior you can rely on. De-indexed? It's been decades since Google started drawing a complete distinction between allowing the Googlebot to crawl and presence in the index. Last time I needed to make a page disappear from the index, I learned that crawl permission had nothing to do with keeping a page in the index or not. In fact, disallowing it in robots was actually the worst thing I could do, since it wouldn't let the bot show up to find my new "noindex" metatags, which are now the only way to make your page drop out of the index.

Having a shortcut like 403ing the robots would actually be useful. LOL

by xp84

1/20/2026 at 12:26:33 AM

I’d say you’re right because I have a custom 404 page returned by the robots.txt route and I’m well indexed by google

by ttoinou

1/19/2026 at 7:50:55 PM

If true, this would mean more websites with genuine content from the "old" internet won't show up (since many personal websites won't have this), while more SEO-optimized content farms that of course do put up a robots.txt will...

by Aardwolf

1/19/2026 at 8:02:11 PM

It also fits Google's plan to create a surrogate web.

- AI was the first step (or actually, among the first five steps or so). CHECK. - Google search has already been ruined. CHECK. - Now robots.txt is used to weed out "old" websites. CHECK.

They do too much evil. But it is also our fault, because we became WAY too dependent on these mega-corporations.

by shevy-java

1/19/2026 at 7:30:50 PM

> Your robots.txt file is the very first thing Googlebot looks for. If it can not reach this file, it will stop and won't crawl the rest of your site. Meaning your pages will remain invisible (on Google).

This implication (stopped crawl means your pages are invisible) directly contradicts Google's own documentation[0] that states:

> If other pages point to your page with descriptive text, Google could still index the URL without visiting the page. If you want to block your page from search results, use another method such as password protection or noindex.

What I get from the article is the big change is Google now treats missing robots.txt as if it disallowed crawling. Meaning you can still get indexed but not crawled (as per above).

My cynical take for this is this is a preparation for a future AI-related lawsuit. Everyone explicitly allowing Google (and/or other crawlers) is a proof they're doing it with website's permission.

Oh, you'd want to appear in Google search results without appearing in Gemini? Tough luck, bro.

[0] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...

by senko

1/19/2026 at 11:39:34 PM

It does not contradict. In their second case, there’s no crawling.

by edwinjm

1/19/2026 at 7:50:40 PM

Don't invest any second of your time into the US tech monopoly. That time is much better spent deploying non-US alternatives and backing up your data from US clouds, which could be blocked for us any moment.

Google is a rent-seeking parasitic middleman leeching off productive businesses, let them hang out with their best friends at the US administration.

by bflesch

1/19/2026 at 7:00:22 PM

My logs tell me that Google ignores my robots.txt.

by forinti

1/19/2026 at 7:27:39 PM

Isn’t it somewhat likely that a lot of shady crawlers pretend to be a google bot with their user agent?

by CDRdude

1/19/2026 at 7:33:46 PM

If you check the ips they belong to Google.

Plus if you run adsense google with ignore crawler rules and visit the page from google ips and from some shady ip. Wonder if it is the same for sites using Analytics.

by ipaddr

1/19/2026 at 7:53:52 PM

Why you still have the idea in your head that they play by the rules. With the current administration they have been empowered to extract maximum value from us.

In the early days of smartphone use, Google and Facebook uploaded contact lists of every single smartphone user to their servers.

by bflesch

1/20/2026 at 12:12:46 AM

Gotta dig -x to find out if they really are from Google

by cookiengineer

1/19/2026 at 7:52:25 PM

I was going to say, this is an absolute win for everyone with a personal site they have been trying to prevent Google from crawling if true.

by 0x1ch

1/19/2026 at 8:50:03 PM

I remember how religiously people used to care about their Google ranking. It's almost shocking to realize how fast that has changed. People used to spend tons of effort gaming site load speed, optimizing sitemaps and writing blog content.

All of that is fast getting completely irrelevant, people see ads on their favourite TikReels app, find their holiday presents on Temu and ask their questions from ChatGPT

by nikanj

1/19/2026 at 9:31:16 PM

Some of it has rebranded to “GEO optimization” (generative ai optimization) and half of that battle is ranking higher in Google since that is where most AI tools search anyway

by AznHisoka

1/19/2026 at 7:33:23 PM

What I'm hearing is that if I tweak robots.txt I can exclude my site from google? Excellent news!

by estimator7292

1/19/2026 at 7:44:22 PM

This is literally the point of robots.txt. It was created to allow site owners to configure how and which parts of their website can be scraped by what bot, and all the "decent" ones (Google, Bing) respect it.

by sofixa

1/19/2026 at 7:54:19 PM

Spoiler: They don't.

by bflesch

1/19/2026 at 11:40:33 PM

Google, Bing do

by edwinjm

1/19/2026 at 7:40:57 PM

Was that not possible before?

by aendruk

1/19/2026 at 8:30:18 PM

no-index is a thing.

by dazc

1/19/2026 at 8:43:35 PM

no-index is per individual page, not for an entire domain, IIUC?

by tremon

1/20/2026 at 3:43:11 AM

You can pretty easily send no-index for an entire site by configuring it as a site-wide HTTP header.

by snowwrestler

1/19/2026 at 8:23:23 PM

I've witnessed a few catastrophes that have resulted in mistakes made via robots.txt, especially when using 'disallow' as an attempt to prevent pages being indexed.

I don't know if the claims made here are true but there really isn't any reason not to have a valid robots.txt available. One could argue that if you want Google to respect robots.txt then not having one should result in Googlebot not crawling any further.

by dazc

1/20/2026 at 5:53:50 AM

Who cares? Top results are anyway paid ads

by nextlevelwizard

1/19/2026 at 6:56:10 PM

The irony is that their AI bots still hoover up all your site content regardless.

by josefritzishere

1/19/2026 at 7:09:50 PM

Two different teams, I suppose. It is quite common in such a big company.

by sixtyj

1/19/2026 at 7:57:08 PM

No need to simp for a megacorp. No matter how much these extremely well-paid US tech workers blame the "organizatioN" for their unethical behavior.

by bflesch

1/19/2026 at 8:00:09 PM

According to Gemini it uses the googlebot cache but it will fetch on demand when it's missing and the user asks for a summary. There are separate UAs you would need to block for those, Googlebot (search) and Google-Extended (AI summaries)

by TurdF3rguson

1/20/2026 at 10:15:50 PM

I don't even bother with Google indexing anymore. They massively de-index perfectly valid and useful pages. And this happens to thousands of sites. Google becomes less and less relevant.

by geldedus

1/19/2026 at 7:17:39 PM

Sounds like great news. Users will eventually figure out other search engines produce more relevant results and Google's dominance will fade. Hopefully they never "fix" it.

by gmiller123456

1/19/2026 at 7:35:07 PM

Users are not aware that other search engines exist.

by hackyhacky

1/19/2026 at 8:28:54 PM

Good luck with that one.

by dazc

1/19/2026 at 8:00:16 PM

A lot of websites have robots.txt and sitemap.xml protected by cloudflare if you can imagine that. That's crazy.

by vicpara

1/19/2026 at 7:03:46 PM

To reach my site, users need to get through the AI summary first. Spoilers: they don't get through more often than not. This is based on the drop of views since AI summary started.

And honestly, I don't blame them. If the summary has the info, why risk going to a possibly ad-filled site?

by ArcHound

1/19/2026 at 7:24:00 PM

> If the summary has the info, why risk going to a possibly ad-filled site?

I can usually tell if the information on a website was written by somebody who knows what they're talking about. (And ads are blocked)

The AI summary on the other hand looks exactly the same to me regardless if it's correct. So it's only useful if I can verify its correctness with minimal effort.

by CodesInChaos

1/19/2026 at 7:46:04 PM

Kagi has an optional AI summary users can trigger on demand, which feels a lot more useful than google’s - most of the time I want the actual websites, but sometimes I just want an overview of the top results which it’s really useful for

by promiseofbeans

1/19/2026 at 8:00:51 PM

It's the '?', right? I think it might use FastGPT

by alex1138

1/19/2026 at 7:19:30 PM

And what if your website is ad free and the AI full of advertising? At least the users get the information and the AI save on your bandwidth (in theory!).

by cocoto

1/19/2026 at 7:41:21 PM

You lose any real attribution and people following other links on your site... Essentially Google took the value and left you with nothing.

by pcdevils

1/19/2026 at 9:40:32 PM

That's assuming one cares about "attribution" and "people following other links on your site". I.e. that's still being a salesman, maybe with extra steps.

In the alternative case, no value is being taken, you're left exactly with what you had before - nothing gained, nothing lost - but some user somewhere gains a little. Apparently even in 2026, the concept of positive-sum exchange, is unfathomable to so many.

by TeMPOraL

1/20/2026 at 1:31:16 PM

> That's assuming one cares about "attribution" and "people following other links on your site". I.e. that's still being a salesman, maybe with extra steps.

No, it's called being part of a community.

Soup kitchens provide free food without requiring anything in return. That doesn't make it OK for you to take as much as you can get and resell it.

> In the alternative case, no value is being taken, you're left exactly with what you had before - nothing gained, nothing lost - but some user somewhere gains a little. Apparently even in 2026, the concept of positive-sum exchange, is unfathomable to so many.

It's not a positive sum exchange. The community is what is lost.

by account42

1/20/2026 at 3:45:37 PM

> Soup kitchens provide free food without requiring anything in return. That doesn't make it OK for you to take as much as you can get and resell it.?

It would be if the kitchen soup had infinite soup available.

Whatever volume of soup you take from the soup kitchen, it's gone from the kitchen. This is not the case with information - you consuming or collecting it does not mean there's less of it at the source.

> No, it's called being part of a community.

Soup kitchens are bad example. They're not there to build a community of poor people. They're there to feed them. The only reason they mind people taking in excess is because supply of soup is finite - take too much, and there won't be enough for someone else. Beyond that, they don't really care what people do with it.

> It's not a positive sum exchange. The community is what is lost.

Nobody other than salesmen and marketers want a community around everything. Especially not when they're looking for facts, or providing a helping hand.

Pay-it-forward is not affected by introduction of an intermediary (AI or otherwise), because it's about giving, not trading.

That's another way of putting this concept that so many don't seem to get: not everything has to be an exchange.

by TeMPOraL

1/19/2026 at 8:18:43 PM

So Google Search is now opt-in? Good.

by Animats

1/19/2026 at 8:28:23 PM

You can use x-robots noindex on any page and it will not be indexed. This has been the case for at least the past decade.

by dazc

1/19/2026 at 8:51:18 PM

That's opt-out, not opt-in.

by Animats

1/20/2026 at 9:06:35 AM

Thanks for sharing - I took a look at my own robots.txt and realised the sitemap was broken.

by mrroryflint

1/19/2026 at 10:54:12 PM

Mildly odd given the desperate bots trying to mop up the entire internet that leeches anything.

by ThinkBeat

1/19/2026 at 7:16:20 PM

Is this a compliance issue? I can't imagine why they would willingly not scrape.

by Onavo

1/19/2026 at 8:40:37 PM

...and not a single link to any Google dev page...

by Bengalilol

1/19/2026 at 7:49:39 PM

This is interesting and unexpected if true.

My only thought is that virtually all "serious" sites tend to have robots.txt, and so not having it indicates a high likelihood of spam.

by crazygringo

1/19/2026 at 7:50:16 PM

not true

by franze

1/19/2026 at 7:35:43 PM

Yes it's _our_ fault Google search was enshittified.

by mwkaufma

1/20/2026 at 2:05:04 AM

> The top Stack Overflow answer on robots.txt has a discussion about Allow: / not being valid according to the spec. The only date for the comments is "Over a year ago" but given that the question is from 2010 the comments are probably from around that time.

Firstly, I detest that stupid "feature" of showing only relative dates. It makes screenshots impossible to date, and it's frankly useless for humans as proven by OP's article.

Secondly, you can hover over the relative date string to see the actual date. But don't let that stop you from hating it.

by wackget

1/20/2026 at 1:42:20 PM

It wouldn't be so bad if it was in addition to absolute dates and times, but that doesn't look as pretty. There is some value in highlighting that something happened within a few seconds/minutes/hours/days although the switchover points should be chosen carefully as to not have huge relative differences between start and end of the range.

by account42

1/19/2026 at 8:00:47 PM

We need to fix Google.

by shevy-java

1/19/2026 at 7:37:55 PM

[dead]

by brianbest101

1/19/2026 at 7:00:57 PM

This is a crazy change. I wonder if part of the reasoning is that sites without a robots.txt tend to be very low-quality. Search is a very hard problem and in a world of LLM-generated internet, it's become way harder.

by linolevan

1/19/2026 at 7:44:46 PM

My take: google marketing found a ploy to make "google" look like a better nettizen than the AI companies that hammer away on sites to the level of a DDOS attack.

by pwg

1/19/2026 at 7:50:55 PM

its not true, just a seo posting stuff and another person thought it was legit

by franze

1/19/2026 at 8:37:07 PM

Honestly, not crazy. This is should have been how it always was. Why should search engine crawling be opt-out rather than opt-in?

by dangus