Should You Reindex Robots.txt After a Website Relaunch?

When you relaunch your website — whether you’ve migrated platforms, changed hosting, or pushed a new design live — your robots.txt file often changes too.
That small text file plays a surprisingly large role in how your site gets discovered and ranked.
So it’s natural to wonder: should you manually reindex your robots.txt file through Google Search Console after a relaunch?

Let’s break down what really happens behind the scenes — and what you should do to make sure your relaunch doesn’t cause an indexing setback.

Google Fetches Robots.txt Automatically — But There’s a Catch

Googlebot checks your robots.txt file frequently — sometimes daily, sometimes instantly after detecting new deployment signals.
That means in most cases, you don’t have to manually reindex the file.

However, relaunches often include structural or directive changes that can temporarily confuse crawlers.
For example:

• Your staging site used a “Disallow: /” directive, and you forgot to remove it.

• You switched to HTTPS or a new subdomain and the robots.txt file path changed.

• You updated disallow rules to control crawl budget or block parameterized URLs.

In these cases, relying solely on Google to “eventually” pick up the change could delay reindexing or, worse, cause the crawler to stop fetching important pages altogether.

When to Manually Prompt Google to Re-Fetch Robots.txt

You should manually trigger a re-fetch in these scenarios:

1. You removed a disallow directive that was blocking critical pages.

2. You added or reorganized sitemap locations inside robots.txt.

3. You moved from staging → production, or the domain/subfolder structure changed.

4. You launched a redesigned WordPress site and adjusted the Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php rule.

Even though Google will refresh it eventually, forcing a re-fetch ensures the new directives take effect immediately.

How to Trigger a Re-Fetch the Right Way (2025 Method)

In 2025, Google’s legacy “robots.txt Tester” has been fully retired.
It’s no longer accessible at its old URL, and instead, Google introduced a robots.txt report within Search Console for domain properties.

Here’s the correct and current process:

1. Open Google Search Console and switch to your domain property (not just a URL prefix property).

2. In the left-hand menu, go to Settings → robots.txt report.

3. You’ll see your robots.txt URL, the last fetch status, and any issues Google encountered.

4. Click the ⋮ (three dots) menu next to the file and select “Request a recrawl.”

   • This prompts Googlebot to immediately fetch the updated robots.txt file.

5. Once submitted, use the URL Inspection tool for a few key pages to verify they’re accessible and no longer blocked.

6. Optionally, resubmit your sitemap.xml (if you’ve moved or renamed it), since that also triggers Google to recheck your crawl settings.

What to Watch After Relaunch

After pushing your robots.txt changes live, monitor:

• Crawl Stats (Settings → Crawl Stats) — look for increased fetches on key pages.

• Index Coverage — confirm that “Blocked by robots.txt” warnings decrease.

• Server logs (if available) — verify that Googlebot is crawling the new robots.txt location.

Typically, Google fully re-crawls and aligns with the new directives within 48–72 hours.

Ongoing Best Practices for Robots.txt Management

• Keep your sitemap declaration at the bottom of the file:
  Sitemap: https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

• Always allow access to essential AJAX endpoints.

• Disallow internal search results, duplicate query parameters, and staging folders.

• Revalidate your file after plugin updates, site migrations, or theme changes that affect URLs.

• Treat robots.txt like a live firewall for SEO visibility — small changes can have big consequences.

Final Thoughts

You don’t technically “reindex” robots.txt — but you should test, validate, and resubmit it any time your site relaunches or your crawl rules change.
Using the new robots.txt report and recrawl feature in Search Console gives you the confidence that Googlebot is working with the latest version.

If your company is preparing for a relaunch or migration, O2 SEO can help design a post-launch SEO checklist that includes robots.txt validation, sitemap integrity, and crawl accessibility testing.
We’ve seen too many relaunches go wrong because of one overlooked line in a robots.txt file — don’t let yours be one of them.