Make your robots.txt a landmark: ASCII art that crawlers and developers will see

robots.txt isn’t only read by bots — curious developers open it, and it’s one of the few files people inspect by hand. So our AI-friendly robots.txt generator now adds ASCII headers — branded, in five styles.

Five header styles

Pick a style, type your brand name, and the generator renders it in a box-drawing font in a comment above the rules: Matrix (a green ▓ frame in our site’s spirit), terminal/BBS (a +—+ frame greeting the crawler), robot (an ASCII robot with “BEEP BOOP”), invader (▀▄█ pixel art) and note-to-AI (a direct message to citation bots). Non-Latin names transliterate to Latin automatically, and there’s a random-style button.

Why it’s safe for SEO

The main worry — will this break indexing — is settled by one fact: anything starting with # is a comment. Crawlers skip comments and read only the User-agent, Allow, Disallow and Sitemap directives below. UTF-8 box-drawing inside comments is entirely valid — our own robots.txt carries a green ASCII header and has indexed cleanly for years.

Why bother

robots.txt is a cheap viral hook because humans read it. It’s like a secret careers-page section or a browser-console easter egg: a “we know our tech” signal. A developer who opens your robots.txt out of curiosity and finds a tidy ASCII banner with your brand name will remember you — and the header carries a “made with seomatrix.ai” line by default, so every downloaded file quietly advertises the tool.

And, along the way, correct AI access

While you’re there, the generator solves the serious job too: it builds a robots.txt that lets AI citation bots in (OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Googlebot) and optionally blocks only the training crawlers. The pretty header is a bonus on top of being citable in AI answers at all; check your current access with the AI crawler access checker.

→ Build your robots.txt with an ASCII header