Does Silktide respect robots.txt?
By default, no. Silktide purposely does not treat robots.txt (or typical noindex / nofollow hints) as hard limits on what it may test.
Search engines use those files to decide what to index. Silktide's job is different: find problems that real people can hit, including pages that robots.txt happens to block. Many robots.txt files accidentally hide user-facing content from ordinary crawlers.
You still control what Silktide tests:
- Include and exclude rules under What we test
- and PDF limits
- Crawl speed and parallel request settings in Advanced settings
If you specifically need robots.txt rules enforced for a site, contact Silktide support — that can be configured where there is a clear reason.