What robots.txt fetches in your logs reveal

What robots.txt fetches in your logs reveal

Googlebot's robots.txt requests are a hidden health signal. References on reading them.

→ Google's robots.txt caching doc — Google fetches it roughly every 24h and caches.
Takeaway: a sudden fetch spike often means Google saw an error and is re-checking.

⭐ Pick of the week: the diagnostic of grepping robots.txt hits over time —
grep '/robots.txt' access.log | grep -i googlebot | awk '{print $4}'
Clustered re-fetches hint at 5xx responses you served on it.
Takeaway: if robots.txt ever 5xx'd, Google may pause crawling the whole site.

→ Google's note: a 5xx on robots.txt is treated as 'disallow all' temporarily.

→ Search Central's robots.txt status-code handling table.

Credit to Google Search Central docs.