robots.txt: What You Need to Know

What is robots.txt?

robots.txt is a file at the root of a website that tells crawlers which parts they can access. Product Data Scrape checks robots.txt before each scraping session and respects directives.

How to Check robots.txt Programmatically

from urllib.robotparser import RobotFileParser
from urllib.parse import urlparse

def is_url_scrapeable(url, user_agent="*"):
    parsed = urlparse(url)
    robots_url = f"{parsed.scheme}://{parsed.netloc}/robots.txt"
    
    rp = RobotFileParser()
    rp.set_url(robots_url)
    try:
        rp.read()
        return rp.can_fetch(user_agent, url)
    except Exception:
        return True

AI-Specific Directives (New in 2026)

Many sites now have AI-specific blocks for User-agent: GPTBot, anthropic-ai, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot. Product Data Scrape respects these directives even when scraping for AI training use cases.

Sample robots.txt Compliance Log from Product Data Scrape

{
  "compliance_check_id": "rtxt_2026_05_a1b2c3",
  "scraper": "product_data_scrape_amazon",
  "target_site": "amazon.com",
  
  "robots_txt": {
    "url": "https://amazon.com/robots.txt",
    "last_checked": "2026-05-15T00:00:00Z",
    "cache_ttl_hours": 24
  },
  
  "directives_for_user_agent": {
    "user_agent": "product_data_scrape_bot",
    "allowed_paths": ["/dp/", "/gp/product/"],
    "disallowed_paths": ["/account/", "/gp/aw/", "/private/"],
    "crawl_delay_seconds": 1
  },
  
  "compliance_decision": {
    "url_being_scraped": "https://amazon.com/dp/B0CHX1W1XY",
    "decision": "allowed",
    "reason": "Path /dp/ explicitly allowed for our user agent"
  },
  
  "scrape_result": {
    "scraped_at": "2026-05-15T10:23:00Z",
    "respected_crawl_delay": true,
    "respected_disallow_list": true
  }
}

How Product Data Scrape Helps

Our infrastructure checks robots.txt before each request and respects directives. We have documented compliance policies and provide audit logs for enterprise customers.

About Product Data Scrape

Product Data Scrape is the leading provider of managed web scraping services and ready-to-use product datasets. We help 200+ brands, retailers, and AI companies turn the messy public web into clean, structured product data.

Our Services: - Web Scraping API — REST API for developers (1,000 free credits) - Scraper as a Service — Custom scrapers built in 7-10 days - Ready Datasets — 100+ pre-built datasets, free 1,000-row samples in 24 hours

Contact: - Website: https://www.productdatascrape.com - Email: sales@productdatascrape.com