Robots Radar

Robots Radar analyses your site's /robots.txt in real time and shows a colour-coded icon directly inside your address bar — no toolbar button, no clicking, instant feedback on every page load.

What the icon means

• 🟢 Green ✓ — the current path is allowed for crawling
• 🔴 Red ✗ — the current path is disallowed
• 🟢 Teal ✓ — no robots.txt found, all paths open
• 📡 Animated radar sweep — shown while fetching (looks great)
• ⚫ Grey ? — robots.txt could not be fetched

Robots Radar implements Google's exact robots.txt specification (RFC 9309):

• Longest path specificity — more specific rules win
• Allow beats Disallow on equal path length
• Multiple groups for the same agent are merged
• Agent normalisation: Googlebot/2.1 and googlebot* both match correctly
• Relaxed blank-line handling (matches Googlebot's documented behaviour)
• Correct wildcard matching: * and $ anchors

Rules are evaluated in this order, falling back to the next if no explicit group is found:

Googlebot → Bingbot → CCBot → Google-Extended → * wildcard

Features

• Animated radar sweep icon during every page scan
• Dark mode and Light mode with a one-click toggle — preference remembered
• Per-domain caching (1 hour TTL) — no redundant fetches on the same domain
• Works in private / incognito windows
• Click the address bar icon for a full breakdown:
  • Which bot group was matched (explicit vs wildcard fallback)
  • The single winning rule with type badge (Allow / Disallow)
  • Specificity bar showing how precise the match was
  • Syntax-highlighted robots.txt source viewer
• Refresh button to bust the cache and re-fetch live

SEO professionals, web developers, site owners, and anyone curious about how search engines see their pages. Robots Radar turns robots.txt from a text file you forget to check into a live dashboard that follows you as you browse.

Privacy

Robots Radar only contacts the domain you are currently visiting, solely to fetch its public /robots.txt file. No data is collected, stored remotely, or shared with anyone. There are no analytics, no tracking, no third-party requests of any kind.

Open source

The full source code is available on GitHub. All code is plain, readable JavaScript — no bundlers, no minification, no obfuscation.