Evaluating OpenAI-Generated Robots.txt Code for Your Portfolio Website: Does It Look Correct?
As a designer and illustrator maintaining a WordPress portfolio, ensuring your website is easily discoverable by search engines is crucial. A well-structured robots.txt file plays a vital role in guiding search engine crawlers, helping optimize your site’s visibility while preventing the indexing of unnecessary or sensitive areas.
Recently, I sought assistance from OpenAI to generate a customized robots.txt file tailored for my portfolio. My goal was to create a file that both facilitates SEO and specifically enhances image search performance—perfect for showcasing artwork, illustrations, and graphics across Google Images and other search engines.
The Context and Approach
While I have some familiarity with HTML and CSS, working with server-side configurations like robots.txt isn’t my everyday task, especially within the WordPress environment. Therefore, I turned to AI assistance, requesting a code snippet that would be:
- Compatible with WordPress
- Optimized for SEO
- Equipped with specific sections to boost image visibility
OpenAI responded with a comprehensive set of directives, claiming the code was optimized for SEO and image search. Here’s the generated robots.txt content, followed by an analysis of its components.
OpenAI-Generated robots.txt Content
“`plaintext
robots.txt for (mywebsite)
Optimized for SEO, WordPress, and Image Search Visibility
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/
Disallow: /wp-content/cache/
Disallow: /wp-content/themes/
Allow: /wp-content/uploads/
Block duplicate or low-value pages
Disallow: /search/
Disallow: /?s=
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /comments/feed/
Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /feed/
Prevent crawling of parameterized URLs (to reduce duplicate content)
Disallow: /?
✅ Image SEO optimization
Allow full access to uploaded media (graphics, illustrations, photos)
Allow: /wp-content/uploads/
Encourage Google Image and Bing Image crawlers
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Allow: /wp-content/uploads/
User-agent: Bingbot
Allow: /wp-content/uploads/