What Are the robots.txt References in My Website Statistics?
If you see entries for /robots.txt in your website statistics (Awstats, Webalizer, or raw access logs), this is completely normal and nothing to worry about. Search engines like Google, Bing, and others check for a robots.txt file before they crawl your website.
What is robots.txt?
The robots.txt file is a plain text file placed in the root of your website (public_html) that tells search engine crawlers which pages or sections of your site they are allowed or not allowed to index. If the file does not exist, search engines will still request it and receive a 404 response, which is perfectly fine. It simply means there are no special crawling restrictions on your site.
Should I Create One?
It is generally a good idea to have a robots.txt file, even a simple one. A basic robots.txt that allows all crawling looks like this:
User-agent: *
Allow: /
You can also use it to block specific directories you do not want indexed, such as admin pages, staging areas, or private folders:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /private/
Disallow: /staging/
Sitemap: https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml
To create this file, use File Manager in cPanel. Navigate to your public_html folder, click +File, name it robots.txt, and add your rules. Adding a Sitemap line pointing to your XML sitemap helps search engines discover and index your content more efficiently.
