User-agent: *
Allow: /
# /_next/static intentionally NOT disallowed (2026-08-12): blocking it prevented
# Google from seeing the X-Robots-Tag noindex on chunk files -> 144 "indexed
# though blocked" zombies, and Googlebot needs these assets to render pages.
# The noindex header (next.config.ts) handles deindexing correctly on its own.
Disallow: /api/

# Image search: Googlebot-Image may fetch optimized images (352 blog heroes +
# OG cards serve via /_next/image since 2026-08-06) — required for Google
# Images + Discover. General crawlers stay blocked from the optimizer.
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Allow: /_next/image
Allow: /


# SEO-tool / bulk crawlers — no value to us, and they re-crawl thousands of
# ISR pages after every deploy on our dime (blocked 2026-08-03; these all
# respect robots.txt). Search engines + AI crawlers stay welcome.
User-agent: SemrushBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: AhrefsBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: MJ12bot
Disallow: /

User-agent: DotBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: BLEXBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: PetalBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: DataForSeoBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: serpstatbot
Disallow: /

User-agent: ZoominfoBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Barkrowler
Disallow: /

User-agent: SeekportBot
Disallow: /

# AI crawlers — explicitly welcome
User-agent: GPTBot
Allow: /

User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Allow: /

User-agent: ClaudeBot
Allow: /

User-agent: Claude-Web
Allow: /

User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /

User-agent: Google-Extended
Allow: /

User-agent: Gemini
Allow: /

User-agent: cohere-ai
Allow: /

User-agent: anthropic-ai
Allow: /

Sitemap: https://valueaddvc.com/sitemap.xml
Sitemap: https://valueaddvc.com/blog-sitemap.xml
Sitemap: https://valueaddvc.com/pulse-sitemap.xml
Sitemap: https://valueaddvc.com/news-sitemap.xml
Sitemap: https://valueaddvc.com/jobs-sitemap.xml
Sitemap: https://valueaddvc.com/image-sitemap.xml