robots.txt.liquid

The robots.txt.liquid template renders the robots.txt file, which is hosted at the /robots.txt URL.

The robots.txt file tells search engines which pages can, or can't, be crawled on a site. It contains groups of rules for doing so, and each group has three main components:

• The user agent, which notes which crawler the group of rules applies to. For example, adsbot-google.
• The rules themselves, which note specific URLs that crawlers can, or can't, access.
• An optional sitemap URL.

Shopify generates a robots.txt file by default, which works for most shops, so this template isn't included in any themes by default.

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The robots.txt.liquid template is located in the templates directory of the theme:

If your theme doesn't already contain the robots.txt.liquid template, then you can add it with the following steps:

1. In the left sidebar, locate the Templates folder.
2. Right-click on the Templates folder.
3. Click New File from the context menu.
4. Name the file robots.txt.liquid.
5. Press Enter to create the file.

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This template can't be a JSON template. It must be robots.txt.liquid.

Adding this template replaces Shopify's generated robots.txt output. The Liquid robots object provides default rule groups that you can use as a starting point for customizations, but the rendered template output doesn't always match the generated file exactly.

Before you publish a customization, save a copy of your current /robots.txt output and compare it with the rendered template output.

The following example outputs the rule groups from the robots object:

While you can replace all the template content with plain text rules, it's strongly recommended to use the provided Liquid objects whenever possible.

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If you want to customize the robots.txt.liquid template, then you need to add it with the following steps:

1. In the code editor for the theme you want to edit, locate the Templates folder.
2. Right-click on the Templates folder.
3. Click New File from the context menu.
4. Name the file robots.txt.liquid.
5. Press Enter to create the file.

To learn about customizing this template, refer to Customize robots.txt.