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Rule · SEO

robots.txt returns 5xx/429 or times out

seo/robots-txt-unreachableerrorvoid seoupdated

Why it matters

When robots.txt errors, Google stops crawling the site (for up to 12 hours), then falls back to a cached copy for up to 30 days.

How to fix it

Serve robots.txt as a static 200 (app/robots.ts is prerendered) and exclude it from rate limiting and auth.

References

void seo reports 60 rules in this category. What search engines need from the raw response: status codes, titles and descriptions in <head>, self-referencing canonicals, one h1, crawlable links, Open Graph, icons, robots.txt and a sitemap with real dates.