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StackOverflow disallows all crawlers in robots.txt file

17 points| yawndex | 7 months ago |stackoverflow.com

6 comments

yawndex|7 months ago

Someone pointed this out on Twitter - it looks like StackOverflow recently updated their robots.txt file to explicitly disallow all crawlers. Obviously, this won't stop those that don't respect robots.txt, but I found this decision strange. Not even Google or Bing's crawlers (which respect robots.txt) will be able to crawl StackOverflow, which could be the final nail in the coffin for SO, since (presumably) most StackOverflow traffic comes from search engines.

integralid|7 months ago

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/404687/our-robots-t...

>After this change, any trusted crawler will continue to see the old copy of robots.txt.

I think this still works for crawlers like Google

cheschire|7 months ago

I just tested it with ChatGPT agent mode and it returned a 502 bad gateway, so even agents are not going to be a source of traffic.

They must really want only organic traffic for some reason.

VivaTechnics|7 months ago

- With the advent of LLMs, sites like StackOverflow are effectively obsolete—robots.txt or not.

- It’s the inevitable consequence when companies cease to innovate.

unknown|7 months ago

[deleted]

integralid|7 months ago

Was stackexchange, a web forum company, supposed to innovate an LLM?

marbro|7 months ago

[deleted]