With the robots.txt file, site owners have a simple way to control which parts of a website are accessible by crawlers. To help site owners further express how search engines and web crawlers can use their pages, the web standards group came up with robots meta tags in 1996, just a few months after meta tags were proposed for HTML (and anecdotally, also before Google was founded). Later, X-Robots-Tag HTTP response headers were added. These instructions are sent together with a URL, so crawlers can only take them into account if they're not disallowed from crawling the URL through the robots.txt file. Together, they form the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP).

A long-standing tool for website owners, robots.txt has been in active use for over 30 years and is broadly supported by crawler operators (such as tools for site owners, services, and search engines). In this edition of the robots refresher series, we'll take a closer look at robots.txt as a flexible way to tell robots what you want them to do (or not do) on your website.

A long-standing tool for website owners, robots.txt has been in active use for over 30 years and is broadly supported by crawler operators (such as tools for site owners, services, and search engines). In this edition of the robots refresher series, we'll take a closer look at robots.txt as a flexible way to tell robots what you want them to do (or not do) on your website.

We're very excited to announce that Search Central Live is going to Madrid for the first time on April 9! The event will have a mix of presenters from the Google Search, News, and Partnerships teams and the content will be delivered in English and Spanish, but we'll have live translation.

On April 2, 2025 we'll be in Johannesburg, South Africa for the very first Search Central Live event in Africa! We're excited to welcome you at Search Central Live South Africa and talk about all things Google Search!

Every now and then we get questions about robots.txt, robots meta tags, and the control functionality that they offer. Following our December series on crawling, we thought this would be the perfect time to put together a light refresher. So, if you're curious about these controls, follow along in this new blog post series!

We're excited to announce that Search Central Live is coming to New York City for the first time on March 20, 2025. The Google Search team has organized events in the city several times, but this time we're bringing our main Search event to the city that never sleeps. Come and join us for a day of discussion, listening, and meeting new people.

We're excited to announce that Search Central Live is returning to São Paulo in 2025. Following our successful events in 2023 and 2024, we're continuing our mission to help Brazilian businesses enhance their site's performance in Google Search. And this year we're visiting Recife for the first time.

Mobile searchers will soon see a cleaner, more streamlined look for how URLs appear in search results. Initially introduced as part of the "site hierarchy" feature, we've found that the breadcrumb element isn't as useful to people who are searching on mobile devices, as it gets cut off on smaller screens. Starting today, we'll no longer show breadcrumbs on mobile search results in all languages and regions where Google Search is available (they continue to appear on desktop search results).

It might happen that by the end of this post you're going to try to decide who wrote this blog post, a large language model (LLM) or Gary. And you'd be right to ponder that and delve into the intricacies of the language used that gives away LLMs, for this is the time of the year when we can get away with publishing a blog post with barely any review (future Gary will deal with the potential, nay, likely fallout I guess). As we often do in the last post of a year, we're looking at what happened on Google Search Central in 2024 according to an LLM (or Gary), and maybe hinting at what might be coming in 2025 (but maybe this is just a hook to keep you reading...).