title: "START YOAST BLOCK" post_status: publish comment_status: open taxonomy: category: - yoast-developer post_tag: - Robots Txt - Features - Repos

This documentation explains how Yoast SEO modifies robots.txt files.

Default content

When a site does not have a user-defined robots.txt file (at the point of installation/activation), Yoast SEO generates a default output.

# START YOAST BLOCK
# ---------------------------
User-agent: *
Disallow:

Sitemap: https://www.example.com/sitemap_index.xml
# ---------------------------
# END YOAST BLOCK

If a robots.txt file already exists and contains non-empty rules, this block should be prefixed before any existing rules.

Controls

Users must be able to edit the contents of their robots.txt file.