Security & SEO

    How does Lemwatch track robots.txt changes?

    Lemwatch snapshots robots.txt on every check and alerts when disallow rules change, sitemaps disappear, or the file returns non-200.

    Updated 2026-07-10
    1 min read
    seo
    robots
    crawler

    Quick answer#

    We snapshot /robots.txt on every scheduled check, diff against the last version, and alert when disallow rules change, sitemap declarations disappear, or the file returns anything other than 200 OK.

    What we flag#

  1. Disallow: / (catastrophic — blocks all crawlers)
  2. New Disallow: rules on important paths
  3. Removed Sitemap: declarations
  4. Non-200 responses on the robots file

    5. Where to find it in Lemwatch#

    Site → SEO → Robots.txt — see current file plus a change log.

    FAQ#

    Do you check per user-agent?#

    Yes — Googlebot, Bingbot, and generic (*) blocks are tracked separately.

    Related#

  5. Sitemap monitoring
  6. SEO monitoring overview
    7. Was this article helpful?

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