Type the domain followed by /robots.txt into your browser's address bar. For example, ottawaseo.com/robots.txt or amazon.ca/robots.txt. The file always sits at the root level of the domain, never in a subdirectory. If the file exists, you'll see plain text directives. If it doesn't exist, you'll get a 404 error, which is fine—robots.txt is optional, and many sites run without one. For bulk checking across multiple domains or subdomains, use Screaming Frog's spider in list mode or write a simple Python script with requests library. Google Search Console also has a dedicated robots.txt tester under the old Search Console interface (though Google keeps threatening to retire it). This tool shows you exactly what Googlebot sees and flags syntax errors in real time. When auditing a client's robots.txt at Ottawa SEO, we check four things: whether critical pages are accidentally blocked (User-agent: * Disallow: /blog/ would be catastrophic), whether the sitemap declaration is present and correct, whether outdated rules are blocking crawl budget on large sites, and whether staging or dev environments are leaking through misconfigured wildcard rules. A shocking number of e-commerce sites block their own category pages or accidentally disallow query parameters that matter for filtering. If you manage the site and can't find robots.txt in your root directory via FTP or cPanel, check your CMS settings. WordPress plugins like Yoast or Rank Math generate virtual robots.txt files that don't exist as physical files on the server. Shopify auto-generates one that you can't fully edit. On Apache servers, .htaccess redirects occasionally rewrite or block robots.txt requests, so test from an incognito window or external tool if the file appears missing but should exist. Always verify the live version matches your local copy before deploying changes—robots.txt mistakes propagate to Google within hours, not days.