# All crawlers — including AI/answer engines (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot,
# etc.) — may index public content. Blocking them was killing GEO visibility;
# event discovery only works if engines can cite our pages.
# Legacy app routes (/auth/, /user/, /friends …) are deliberately NOT disallowed:
# they answer 410 and crawlers must be able to fetch them to drop them from the
# index (a robots block would freeze them as "indexed, though blocked").
User-agent: *
Disallow: /api/
Disallow: /embed/
Disallow: /email/
Disallow: /explore?
Disallow: /filters
# Filtered feed views (?when=, ?cat=, ...) are noindex and combinatorial; keep
# crawl budget on /city/<slug>, ?page=N, /event/* and /venue/*.
Disallow: /*?when=
Disallow: /*&when=
Disallow: /*?cat=
Disallow: /*&cat=
Disallow: /*?free=
Disallow: /*&free=
Disallow: /*?paid=
Disallow: /*&paid=
Disallow: /*?max=
Disallow: /*&max=
Disallow: /*?tod=
Disallow: /*&tod=
Disallow: /*?region=
Disallow: /*&region=
Disallow: /*?q=
Disallow: /*&q=
Disallow: /*?performer=
Disallow: /*&performer=
Disallow: /*?view=
Disallow: /*&view=
# sort=date and near= reorder/narrow the same listings (the default `featured`
# order lives on the bare URL and is the only one worth crawling).
Disallow: /*?sort=
Disallow: /*&sort=
Disallow: /*?near=
Disallow: /*&near=


# SEO-tool crawlers (Oct 2026: Ahrefs ~38k req/day, Semrush ~7k, a fifth of all
# traffic, mostly re-fetching 410'd past events). Verified bots skip the WAF, but
# they honour robots.txt. A named group REPLACES `*` for that bot, so the
# Disallow list below must mirror the one above. Change both together.
User-agent: AhrefsBot
User-agent: SemrushBot
Crawl-delay: 10
Disallow: /api/
Disallow: /embed/
Disallow: /email/
Disallow: /explore?
Disallow: /filters
Disallow: /*?when=
Disallow: /*&when=
Disallow: /*?cat=
Disallow: /*&cat=
Disallow: /*?free=
Disallow: /*&free=
Disallow: /*?paid=
Disallow: /*&paid=
Disallow: /*?max=
Disallow: /*&max=
Disallow: /*?tod=
Disallow: /*&tod=
Disallow: /*?region=
Disallow: /*&region=
Disallow: /*?q=
Disallow: /*&q=
Disallow: /*?performer=
Disallow: /*&performer=
Disallow: /*?view=
Disallow: /*&view=
Disallow: /*?sort=
Disallow: /*&sort=
Disallow: /*?near=
Disallow: /*&near=

# Backlink crawlers with no value to us.
User-agent: MJ12bot
User-agent: DotBot
Disallow: /

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