robots.txt is blocking the assets your schema depends on

robots.txt is blocking the assets your schema depends on

A subtle one from technical audits: the JSON-LD is fine, but robots.txt disallows the /assets/ or /cdn/ path holding the images, or blocks the JS file that renders the markup. Google can't fetch what's referenced, so the rich result degrades even though the structured data itself was never blocked.

What it means for you: blocking CSS and JS from Googlebot has been discouraged for years, but it still quietly breaks schema that depends on rendered content or on referenced image assets. Audit your Disallow rules against every URL your markup points to.

Watch this: a blanket Disallow: /*? to control crawl budget can block parameterized image-resizer URLs your Product markup uses — a one-line rule, a whole catalog's snippets gone.