Columnist Patrick Stox provides some dos and don'ts for creating your robots.txt file -- along with examples of companies who have gotten creative with their files.

Using wildcards As you can see in the examples above, wildcards (*) are handy for making flexible robots.txt files. They let you apply rules to many bots or pages without listing each one.

One of the best ways to protect artists’ creative work is to prevent it from ever being seen by “AI crawlers” – the programs ...

Robots.txt files can be centralized on CDNs, not just root domains. Websites can redirect robots.txt from main domain to CDN. This unorthodox approach complies with updated standards.

AI search engine Perplexity is using stealth bots and other tactics to evade websites’ no-crawl directives, an allegation ...

Select All Files from the MS Word file format list 4. Choose a format from the drop-down list—for our example, we’ll choose Text Files (TXT). 5. Navigate to the appropriate folder.