They control what search engines and AI crawlers find and what they waste time on. A sitemap listing only your live, indexable URLs helps Google discover new service and city pages quickly, while one stray Disallow line in robots.txt can hide the entire site.
Check that the sitemap excludes redirects, 404s, tag archives, and thank-you pages, that robots.txt references it, and that it is submitted in Search Console. After any redesign, verify robots.txt did not carry over the staging block telling every crawler to stay out. That single line has cost businesses months of visibility.
Not sure what your robots.txt says? Book a free technical audit →
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