Daily Search Forum Recap: August 20, 2025

John Mueller from Google said that the new Content Signals robots.txt directive invented by Cloudflare last year has “no effects whatsoever for any crawler or LLM.” He added that it “just adds bloat and future maintenance to your robots.txt file.” As far as he knows, he said, none of the crawlers or LLMs use the content-signal robots.txt directives.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web…

Google’s Local Service Ads advertiser console, where advertisers go to manage their LSAs, has been inaccessible for many advertisers since this morning. Google has not yet confirmed the issue but I see a number of complaints from advertisers starting at around 8 am ET.