Misquoted Confidence: high
Primary source found, but the way it is quoted changes the subject, metric, population or precision.
Safe rephrasing
Google says robots.txt controls crawling, not indexing; to keep a page out of Google, use noindex or password protection.
What the source says
This is used mainly to avoid overloading your site with requests; it is not a mechanism for keeping a web page out of Google . To keep a web page out of Google, block indexing with noindex or password-protect the page.
Google Search Central — Introduction to robots.txt
- Commonly cited as
- "Disallow it in robots.txt to deindex it"
- True origin
- Google Search Central — Introduction to robots.txt
- Type
- Stat check: A widely repeated statistic traced back to its origin.
- Year
- Current documentation
- Data as of
- Documentation read on 2026-10-17
- Last checked
- Method & sample
- Official Google documentation (current version read Oct. 17, 2026).
- Drift between quote and source
- Type: a crawl-control file presented as an indexing control
- Interest
- Google operates Google Search and documents its own systems.