A single wrong line in robots.txt can hide your whole site from search. This robots txt tester reads the live file from a URL and lays out every rule, free, so you can see exactly what crawlers are allowed to do. It runs URL-first, with no setup.
Paste a URL, read the rules.
Point the tool at a domain and it fetches the file from the site root, then groups the directives by crawler. That is all there is to how to check robots txt: you do not need the command line or an account. As a robots txt checker and robots txt tester it handles your own site or anyone else's.
Use it to check robots txt file rules whenever you deploy, since a change to the file is easy to get wrong. If you just want to confirm a fix went live, run a quick robot check to check my robots txt file and test robots txt file behavior against what you expected.
A working alternative.
Beyond reading the file, the tool acts as a robots txt validator by laying out conflicting or malformed rules clearly, so a stray disallow is easy to catch. If you used to rely on the google robots txt tester, note that Google retired it from the old Search Console, and this page fills the same gap by parsing the current file the way a crawler would.
The basics, and the next step.
A robots file, sometimes loosely called robot text, is a plain text file at your site root that tells crawlers which paths they may request. Polite bots follow it, so it shapes what gets crawled. If you do not have one yet, the Robots.txt Generator lets you create robots txt online, and then you can come straight back here to confirm the live file reads correctly.
No command line, no Search Console login.
Here's how to check robots txt of a website without any tooling beyond this page. Paste the domain, or the full /robots.txt address, and press Load. The reader fetches the live file over the network, exactly what a crawler receives, and lays the rules out grouped by user-agent with color-coded Allow, Disallow, and Crawl-delay badges. Every Sitemap declaration is collected at the bottom.
Reading it is where the value is. If a page vanished from search overnight, scan the groups for a stray Disallow that now covers it. Check that the file loads at all, since a 404 means no rules apply, and confirm the Sitemap line still points at a live URL. It works on your own domain after a deploy or on a competitor's public file, since reading robots.txt is just a normal fetch of a public document.
Try it now
The tool is one click away. No sign up, no upload, no payment.
Open Robots.txt Reader