#****************************************************************************
# robots.txt
#     : Robots, spiders, and search engines use this file to detmine which 
#       content they should *not* crawl while indexing your website.
#     : This system is called "The Robots Exclusion Standard."
#     : It is strongly encouraged to use a robots.txt validator to check
#       for valid syntax before any robots read it!
#
# Examples:
#
# Instruct all robots to stay out of the admin area.
#     : User-agent: *
#     : Disallow:   /admin/
#
# Restrict Google and MSN from indexing your images.
#     : User-agent: Googlebot
#     : Disallow:   /images/
#     : User-agent: MSNBot
#     : Disallow:   /images/
#****************************************************************************

# --- SEO / competitor-intelligence scrapers ---
# No audience value for the firm; ~50k requests/month combined (VL-167 audit).
# robots.txt is advisory. Barkrowler and MJ12bot are known to ignore it, so
# anything that must actually stop belongs in a WP Engine / Cloudflare rule.

User-agent: SemrushBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: AhrefsBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: SerpstatBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: DataForSeoBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: MJ12bot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Barkrowler
Disallow: /

User-agent: SEranking
Disallow: /

User-agent: BrightEdge
Disallow: /

# --- Everything else ---

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-login.php
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php

Sitemap: https://www.varnumlaw.com/sitemap_index.xml