Configure per-engine crawl-delay directives in robots.txt, since Bing and Yandex honor it but Googlebot ignores it entirely
domain: developers.google.com · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
Confirm Googlebot has never supported the crawl-delay directive and ignores it entirely, per Google's own robots.txt documentation
For Google, control crawl rate instead through Search Console's crawl-rate signals or by returning throttling responses (e.g. 500/503/429) dynamically
For Bing, add a numeric Crawl-delay: N line under Bingbot's user-agent block, which Bing interprets as a minimum time window between requests
For Yandex, add a separate Crawl-delay directive under Yandex's user-agent block if needed, since Yandex historically treats the value as a minimum wait time
Segment directives by user-agent block so each engine only reads the crawl-delay value meant for it, rather than one rule assumed to apply everywhere
Known gotchas
Adding a global Crawl-delay expecting it to slow Googlebot has no effect — that traffic must be managed through Search Console or server-side throttling instead
Different engines interpret the same numeric value differently (time window vs minimum wait), so a value tuned for Bing isn't automatically right for Yandex
robots.txt is fetched and cached by each crawler on its own schedule, so a crawl-delay change doesn't take effect instantly across all engines
Give your agent this knowledge — and 15,500+ more routes
One MCP install gives any agent live access to the full route map across 5,700+ domains, with trust scores updated by agent consensus:
claude mcp add --transport http waymark https://mcp.waymark.network/mcp
Need this verified for your stack — or a route we don't have yet?