Understanding the robots.txt Analyzer in SureRank

SureRank automatically checks your site’s robots.txt file for common mistakes that can hurt your SEO, and flags them for you in one place, so you don’t have to read the raw file yourself.

Where to Find It

Go to SureRank → Dashboard. You’ll see a Site SEO Audit section (also available as its own page) listing several automatic checks, including one for Robots.txt. Click View Details on that row to see the full explanation.

This is a different screen from the Robots.txt Editor (under Advanced), which is where you manually edit the contents of your robots.txt file. The Analyzer doesn’t let you edit anything. It just reviews what’s already live on your site and tells you if anything looks wrong.

What It Checks

The Analyzer fetches your site’s live, public robots.txt file and checks it for the three most common problems:

1. Blocking your entire site from search engines. For example, a rule that accidentally tells search engines not to crawl anything at all. This is the most serious issue it looks for, since it can cause your whole site to drop out of search results.
2. Blocking resources search engines need to render your pages. For example, rules that block your theme’s stylesheet or core scripts. Search engines need these to properly understand how your pages look and function. Blocking them can hurt how your site is understood and ranked.
3. Rules that search engines can’t understand and will simply ignore. Such as misspelled directives (e.g. “Dissallow” instead of “Disallow”) or rules placed without a proper heading above them. These lines quietly do nothing, which can be surprising if you added them expecting them to work.

What the Results Mean

If more than one issue is present, the Analyzer shows you the most serious one first.

How to Fix a Flagged Issue

1. Open SureRank → Advanced → Robots.txt Editor to review your current file.
2. If the Analyzer flagged a full-site block, look for a line like Disallow: / under a User-agent: * (or Googlebot) heading, and remove or adjust it so it only blocks what you actually intend to block.
3. If it flagged blocked resources, remove or adjust any Disallow rules pointing at your theme, wp-includes, or script/style folders.
4. If it flagged unreadable rules, check for typos in directive names (Disallow, Allow, User-agent, Sitemap) and make sure every Allow/Disallow line has a User-agent line above it.
5. Save your changes and re-check the Site SEO Audit page. The result updates automatically.

If That Doesn’t Work

If the Analyzer keeps reporting “missing or inaccessible” even though you can see a robots.txt file when you visit it in a browser, or if you’re not sure how to safely edit a rule, please reach out to support with your site URL and we’ll take a look.