> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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
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!).
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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
It's the '?', right? I think it might use FastGPT
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!).
You lose any real attribution and people following other links on your site... Essentially Google took the value and left you with nothing.
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?
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.
Because you can see pages not affected doesn't guarantee they will stay that way.
My logs tell me that Google ignores my robots.txt.
Isn’t it somewhat likely that a lot of shady crawlers pretend to be a google bot with their user agent?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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/...
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...
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.
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.
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.
its not true, just a seo posting stuff and another person thought it was legit
Honestly, not crazy. This is should have been how it always was. Why should search engine crawling be opt-out rather than opt-in?
What I'm hearing is that if I tweak robots.txt I can exclude my site from google? Excellent news!
Was that not possible before?
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.
Spoiler: They don't.
no-index is a thing.
no-index is per individual page, not for an entire domain, IIUC?
Fake or just miss-informed
this is the support page https://support.google.com/webmasters/community-video/360202...
this is the creators linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/iskgti/
he does not work for google, just a seo somewhere that creates videos and posts his hypothesis in forums
this is his youtube account https://m.youtube.com/@saket_gupta
nice high quality - propably ai created videos - still no relationship to reality
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.
not true
A lot of websites have robots.txt and sitemap.xml protected by cloudflare if you can imagine that. That's crazy.
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.
Users are not aware that other search engines exist.
Good luck with that one.
So Google Search is now opt-in? Good.
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.
That's opt-out, not opt-in.
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
Yes it's _our_ fault Google search was enshittified.
...and not a single link to any Google dev page...
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.
We need to fix Google.
The irony is that their AI bots still hoover up all your site content regardless.
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)
Two different teams, I suppose. It is quite common in such a big company.
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.
"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
Is this a compliance issue? I can't imagine why they would willingly not scrape.