CeeWP

CeeWP Robots.txt Manager is a lightweight and user-friendly plugin that allows you to easily manage your WordPress site’s virtual robots.txt file. Add custom rules without creating physical files, with full control over search engine access to your content.
Why Choose Robots.txt Manager?
<ul>
<li>No File Management: Works with WordPress’s built-in virtual robots.txt system</li>
<li>Two Operating Modes: Choose between appending to or replacing default rules</li>
<li>User-Friendly Interface: Clean admin panel with helpful examples</li>
<li>WordPress Standards: Follows all WordPress coding and security standards</li>
<li>Automatic Cleanup: Removes all data when uninstalled</li>
</ul>
Key Features:
<ul>
<li>Simple interface to add custom robots.txt rules</li>
<li>Replace Mode: Option to completely replace WordPress default robots.txt with custom rules</li>
<li>Append Mode: Add custom rules to existing WordPress robots.txt (default behavior)</li>
<li>Dynamic Textarea: Automatically adjusts height based on content</li>
<li>Live Preview: Direct link to view your robots.txt file</li>
<li>Smart Warnings: Alerts when search engines are discouraged</li>
<li>Privacy Respect: Honors WordPress privacy settings</li>
<li>Examples Included: Ready-to-use code snippets for common scenarios</li>
<li>Professional UI: Modern interface with WordPress dashicons</li>
</ul>
Perfect for:
<ul>
<li>SEO Professionals: Fine-tune search engine crawling behavior</li>
<li>Website Owners: Block access to private directories and files</li>
<li>Developers: Prevent indexing of development or staging content</li>
<li>E-commerce Sites: Control bot access to sensitive areas</li>
<li>Content Creators: Manage sitemap declarations and crawl rates</li>
</ul>
How It Works:
The plugin adds a new menu item under Settings > Robots.txt Manager where you can easily add your custom rules. Choose between two modes:
<ul>
<li>Append Mode (Default): Your custom rules are added to WordPress’s default robots.txt</li>
<li>Replace Mode: Your custom rules completely replace WordPress’s default robots.txt</li>
</ul>
The interface includes helpful examples, real-time textarea sizing, and a direct link to view your live robots.txt file.
<h3>Privacy</h3>
This plugin does not collect, store, or transmit any personal data. All settings are stored locally in your WordPress database and are only used to generate your robots.txt file.
<h3>Credits</h3>
Developed with ❤️ by CeeWP – https://ceewp.com/
Special thanks to the WordPress community for continuous inspiration and feedback.

CeeWP Robots.txt Manager

Easily manage your WordPress site's virtual robots.txt file with custom rules. No physical file needed!

Jon Henshaw

Coywolf Robots.txt Manager turns robots.txt into a managed list of rules you build from the WordPress admin — no FTP, no hand-editing. It ships the full catalog of bots from the Cloudflare Bot Directory, grouped by category (AI Crawler, Search Engine Crawler, Advertising, Security, and more), so you can disallow whole categories of unwanted bots with a click.
<ul>
<li>Rules table — every directive as a row with a name and plain-English description, with bulk delete and pagination. Identical directives are consolidated.</li>
<li>Direct editor — a Robots.txt page shows the current file in an editable box; saving re-parses and optimizes your hand edits into managed rules. A copy button puts the whole robots.txt on your clipboard.</li>
<li>Guided rule editor — choose a Rule Type (Disallow or Allow) and a Rule Path (folder, prefix, file type, query string, allow-exception, and more); the editor builds the correct directive, with auto-filled name and description, plus a URL testing tool.</li>
<li>Conflict checking — every add or edit is checked against existing rules; if it duplicates or contradicts one, the editor explains the clash and won’t save until it’s resolved.</li>
<li>Bot catalog — every bot from the Cloudflare Bot Directory, plus a curated set of well-known AI crawlers it doesn’t list yet (ClaudeBot, CCBot, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended, and more), grouped by category, with select-all per category. The catalog ships with the plugin and is refreshed through plugin updates.</li>
<li>Curated robots.txt tokens — the exact User-agent token each bot obeys is curated for all 600+ bots (the directory’s own match data is often a URL, operator name, or generic word), so rules block the right token and imported robots.txt files match the right bot.</li>
<li>Commented output — each rule is written as its own section prefixed with a comment carrying its name and description; a rule’s bots are stacked under User-agent: lines with the directive written once.</li>
<li>Physical or virtual — write a real robots.txt in your site root, or let WordPress serve it virtually. On install, an existing physical file is detected, managed, and imported automatically.</li>
<li>Backup & restore — your original robots.txt is captured before the plugin reads, parses, or rewrites anything; on deactivation it asks whether to restore that original or keep the rules it built (markers removed).</li>
<li>Import & export — on the Import / Export Rules page, download all rules and settings preferences as one JSON file, then import it to restore them or copy the setup to another site. Import replaces the current rules; sitemap URLs aren’t included (they’re site-specific).</li>
<li>Optional comments — the per-rule description comments can be excluded from robots.txt under Settings → Rule comments, and added back any time.</li>
<li>Role-based access — under Settings → Access, choose which user roles can see and use the plugin; Administrator is always allowed and can’t be locked out. Only administrators can change the access list and the serving mode.</li>
<li>Cleans up on import — fixes misspelled directives, missing colons, and missing leading slashes; consolidates duplicate user-agent groups and resolves Allow/Disallow conflicts; strips deprecated/unsupported directives (Crawl-delay, Noindex, Nofollow, Host, Request-rate, Visit-time); removes render-blocking /.css and /.js blocks and the overly broad /wp-content/; fixes malformed wildcards; and makes Sitemap links absolute and de-duplicated, dropping any that point at a different domain (also handles a UTF-8 BOM and Google’s 500 KiB limit).</li>
<li>XML sitemaps — add sitemap URLs under Settings → XML sitemaps (written at the end of robots.txt), or exclude sitemap links entirely.</li>
<li>Owns the virtual robots.txt — in virtual mode the plugin serves the whole file. WordPress’s own default rules (Disallow: /wp-admin/) are imported and reconciled into your managed rules when you activate or switch to virtual (WordPress’s rules win, so its “*” rule absorbs a matching per-bot rule), and WordPress stops adding a duplicate block on top. Other SEO plugins’ additions (e.g. Yoast) are excluded too. Physical mode is served by WordPress directly.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Conflict resolution</h3>
When rules are imported, or you hand-edit the Robots.txt page and save, the plugin re-parses everything and resolves conflicts automatically with opinionated, deterministic decisions:
<ul>
<li>Identical directives that differ only by user-agent are consolidated into one rule listing every agent; duplicate User-agent groups are merged case-insensitively.</li>
<li>When an agent both allows and disallows the same path, the later rule wins, and a blanket Disallow: / is dropped for an agent that has more specific rules.</li>
<li>If a directive applies to * as well as named bots for the same path, it collapses to just * (the wildcard already covers them).</li>
<li>In virtual mode WordPress’s own User-agent: * base rules (the /wp-admin/ block) win and absorb any matching per-bot rule, and are served once instead of duplicated on top.</li>
<li>Deprecated/unsupported directives are removed (Crawl-delay, Noindex, Nofollow, Host, Request-rate, Visit-time).</li>
<li>SEO-harmful blocks are removed (render-blocking /.css and /.js, and the overly broad /wp-content/).</li>
<li>Syntax is repaired (misspelled directives, a missing colon, a missing leading slash, malformed wildcards).</li>
<li>Sitemap links are made absolute and de-duplicated (preferring https); cross-domain ones are dropped; a UTF-8 BOM is stripped and Google’s 500 KiB limit is honored.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Bot tokens</h3>
Blocking a bot only works if robots.txt uses the exact User-agent token that bot obeys. The bundled Cloudflare Bot Directory isn’t reliable for this — its match data is often a URL, the operator’s name, or a generic word like “Bot” — so every one of the 600+ bots has a curated robots.txt token, researched against each operator’s documentation and the product token in its real user-agent (e.g. Toutiao → Bytespider, Internet Archive → archive.org_bot, BrightEdge Bot → BrightEdge). Each entry records the variant spellings that should map to it, so importing an existing robots.txt matches the right catalog bot. The tokens are bundled with the plugin and kept current through plugin updates. Bots that publish no robots.txt-targetable token (e.g. “signed agents” that identify cryptographically) are left out of the list, since robots.txt can’t target them.

Coywolf Robots.txt Manager

Manage robots.txt from the WordPress admin: build rules, block bots by category, and serve a physical or virtual robots.txt.

CeeWP Robots.txt Manager vs Coywolf Robots.txt Manager