robots.txt · Wix
Wix robots.txt, explained line by line
Wix ships a small, opinionated robots.txt with one rule that quietly prevents a duplicate-content problem and one blanket block most site owners never knowingly chose. Here is what each group does, where the editor is hidden, and what not to paste over it.
User-agent: *
Allow: /
Disallow: *?lightbox=
User-agent: AdsBot-Google-Mobile
Disallow: /_partials*
Disallow: /pro-gallery-webapp/v1/galleries/*
User-agent: AdsBot-Google
Disallow: /_partials*
Disallow: /pro-gallery-webapp/v1/galleries/*
User-agent: PetalBot
Disallow: /
User-agent: dotbot
Crawl-delay: 10
User-agent: AhrefsBot
Crawl-delay: 10
Sitemap: https://www.example.com/sitemap.xmlTaken from a live Wix site running the default file. Wix revises this template over time.
What each default group actually does
Seven blocks, and only one of them is about your content. The rest are Wix protecting its own internal endpoints and throttling third-party crawlers.
User-agent: * / Allow: /Opens the whole site to every crawler.
Wix documents that its robots.txt allows search engine bots to access all of your pages by default. The explicit Allow: / is redundant under the standard — absence of rules already means allowed — but it makes the intent unambiguous for anyone reading the file.
Disallow: *?lightbox=The only page-level block Wix ships.
Wix lightboxes are served as a URL variant of the page behind them. Left crawlable, every page with a lightbox generates a near-duplicate URL carrying the same content. This one line is doing real duplicate-content work, and it is the line most often lost when people paste a new file over the default.
User-agent: AdsBot-Google and AdsBot-Google-MobileTwo dedicated groups for Google's ad landing-page checkers.
AdsBot ignores wildcard rule groups, so anything you want it to respect has to be addressed to it by name. That is why these exist as separate blocks rather than lines in the main group.
Disallow: /_partials* and /pro-gallery-webapp/v1/galleries/*Steers AdsBot away from two Wix internal endpoints.
/_partials serves rendered page fragments and the pro-gallery web app serves gallery data, not pages. An ad quality checker landing on either would see a fragment instead of your landing page and could judge the ad experience on it.
User-agent: PetalBot — Disallow: /A blanket block on Huawei's search crawler, on by default.
Worth knowing rather than worth panicking about. If you sell into markets where Petal Search matters, this default is actively working against you and you will need to remove it deliberately.
Crawl-delay: 10 for dotbot and AhrefsBotThrottles two third-party SEO crawlers rather than blocking them.
Keeps backlink crawlers from hammering a shared-hosting site. Note that Googlebot and Bingbot ignore Crawl-delay entirely — it only affects bots that choose to honour it, so it is never a way to slow down the crawlers that matter most.
Sitemap: https://www.example.com/sitemap.xmlWix generates and links your sitemap automatically.
You do not maintain this. The generated sitemap also respects pages you have set as password-protected, members-only, or excluded from search, so those settings and this file stay consistent without manual work.
What Wix lets you edit
Full text control through a dashboard editor that is buried far enough down the SEO panel that most people never find it.
Where the editor lives
Site dashboard → SEO & GEO → scroll to "Tools and settings" → Robots.txt Editor → View File. Add your directives under "This is your current file", then Save Changes and Save.
There is no file to upload
Wix has no FTP and no filesystem you can reach. The dashboard editor is the only way in, which also means you cannot accidentally end up with a stale physical file overriding your settings the way you can on WordPress.
You can reset to default
The editor lets you restore the default file. Given how easy it is to delete a rule that was doing real work, this is the safety net worth remembering before you experiment.
Wix will not support your edits
Wix states plainly that editing robots.txt may cause issues with your pages appearing in search results and that Customer Care cannot assist with custom edits. You own whatever you put in that box.
AI crawler rules for Wix
Wix says nothing about AI crawlers by default. Append either block below the existing groups in the Robots.txt Editor — do not replace what is already there. What each bot does is covered in our AI crawlers reference →
# Paste into the Wix Robots.txt Editor
User-agent: GPTBot
Allow: /
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /
User-agent: ClaudeBot
Allow: /
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /
User-agent: Google-Extended
Allow: /# Only if you accept losing AI answer visibility
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /
User-agent: ClaudeBot
Disallow: /
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Disallow: /
User-agent: Google-Extended
Disallow: /Be honest about the trade. Blocking these crawlers does not protect your rankings — it removes your pages from the crawls that feed ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity, so the citations and referral clicks go with them. Google-Extended is the one narrower case: it governs whether your content is used for Gemini and Vertex AI generative products, and does not affect your inclusion in Google Search.
The Wix-specific mistakes
Wix gives you a plain text box and no guardrails, which makes overwriting a useful default the easiest mistake on the platform.
Deleting the lightbox rule when you rewrite the file
Disallow: *?lightbox= is the only genuinely protective rule in the Wix default. Paste a new file over the top without carrying it across and every lightbox on your site starts producing a crawlable duplicate of the page behind it.
Pasting a WordPress robots.txt into the editor
Disallow: /wp-admin/ and Disallow: /wp-content/ refer to paths that do not exist on Wix. They do nothing, and they arrive as part of a copied block that typically replaces the AdsBot groups and the lightbox rule with noise.
Using Disallow when you meant "hide this page"
Disallow blocks crawling, not indexing — a blocked URL with inbound links can still show up as a bare title with no snippet. Wix has a per-page setting to keep a page out of search results, which applies a noindex tag. That is the correct tool, and it needs the page to stay crawlable so the tag can be read.
Expecting the change to appear instantly
Wix notes that search engines only pick up the new file on their next crawl of it. Nothing is broken if Search Console still shows the old rules an hour later; the served file is the source of truth, so check that directly.
Leaving PetalBot blocked without deciding to
This is a default nobody chose. If Huawei devices and Petal Search are irrelevant to your market, ignore it — but if they are not, you are shipping a blanket block you never opted into.
Build the file instead of copying one
Our robots.txt generator takes your URL and produces a file with the right sitemap directive and crawl rules for your site, as part of a free strategy run.
Open the robots.txt generatorOr let the agent ship it
Rankealo's SEO agent can open a pull request with the robots.txt fix already written, so a crawl-blocking rule gets reviewed and merged instead of sitting in a report.
See how the SEO agent worksrobots.txt on another platform?
WordPress robots.txt
The virtual file, plugins, and the deindex checkbox
Read the guideShopify robots.txt
robots.txt.liquid and what stays locked
Read the guideWebflow robots.txt
Site settings SEO tab and plan limits
Read the guideNext.js robots.txt
app/robots.ts, Host, and AI crawler Allow groups
Read the guideWix robots.txt questions
How do you edit robots.txt on Wix?
Go to your site dashboard, open SEO & GEO, scroll to "Tools and settings", click Robots.txt Editor, then View File. Add your directives under "This is your current file" and click Save Changes followed by Save. There is no file upload and no FTP — the dashboard editor is the only way to change it, and you can reset to the default from the same screen.
What is in the default Wix robots.txt?
A wildcard group that allows everything except lightbox URL variants, two AdsBot groups that keep Google's ad checkers away from Wix internal endpoints, a blanket block on Huawei's PetalBot, crawl delays for dotbot and AhrefsBot, and a Sitemap directive pointing at your auto-generated sitemap.xml. The important part is that ordinary search crawlers are allowed everywhere by default.
Why does Wix block ?lightbox= URLs?
Because a Wix lightbox is served as a URL variant of the page underneath it. Without that rule, every page carrying a lightbox would produce an extra crawlable URL with substantially the same content, which spreads crawl budget across duplicates for no benefit. Keep the rule if you rewrite your file.
Should I block AI crawlers like GPTBot on Wix?
Usually not. Blocking GPTBot, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot removes your pages from the crawls that feed those assistants, so you also lose the citations and referral traffic they generate. Google-Extended is the narrower decision: it governs whether your content is used for Gemini and Vertex AI generative products, and it does not affect your inclusion in Google Search.
