Both 'robots.txt' and 'sitemap.xml' must be placed in the root directory of your website (e.g., yourdomain.com/robots.txt and yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml). Search engines look for them automatically at these locations.

It depends on your goals. If you don't want your content used for training AI models without permission, blocking them in robots.txt is the industry-standard signal. However, blocking won't stop all crawlers—it's voluntary compliance.

Priority tells search engines which pages are most important relative to other URLs on your site. Scale is 0.0 to 1.0, with 1.0 usually for homepage or high-value landing pages. It doesn't affect your ranking against other sites.

No, but it's a fundamental technical step. These files help search engines discover your content and avoid wasting crawl budget on irrelevant pages. Good SEO requires quality content, backlinks, and technical optimization combined.

robots.txt is essential for controlling crawler access. sitemap.xml is recommended but optional—search engines can find pages by crawling, but sitemaps ensure they discover all important content, especially on large sites.

Yes, for large sites (50,000+ URLs), split into multiple sitemaps and create a sitemap index file. Our generator handles single sitemaps up to 50,000 URLs which covers most small-to-medium websites.

Update whenever you publish new important content or make significant changes. For blogs, weekly or monthly updates are typical. Set the 'changefreq' based on how often each page actually updates.

Blocking good search engine bots (Googlebot, Bingbot) will hurt SEO. Blocking AI crawlers has no SEO impact—these bots don't contribute to search rankings. Be selective about which bots you allow.