Google adds robots.txt limits and 503 downtime rules – what local sites must do

Local businesses rely on organic search and Google Discover to attract foot traffic; a clean crawl‑budget and error‑free site are essential for ranking in “near me” queries.

Google announced three concrete updates: robots.txt files can no longer exceed 32 KB, bracketed URLs (e.g., example.com/page[1]) are now blocked by default, and sites undergoing PHP patches should serve a 503 response instead of a generic 200 to signal temporary downtime.

If a coffee shop’s site returns 200 during a patch, Google may index a broken page and penalise the domain, while an oversized robots.txt can cause Googlebot to stop crawling new menu items, directly reducing local search impressions.

A hair salon using a custom booking page will need to ensure the 503 header is set during maintenance to keep its “Book Now” slot visible; a pet groomer with a photo gallery must remove bracket syntax from URLs to avoid being dropped from Discover; a fitness studio should audit its robots.txt to stay under 32 KB and explicitly allow Googlebot to crawl class schedules.

Watch Google’s Search Central blog for the rollout schedule (phased over the next 30 days) and monitor Search Console for “Crawl errors” and “Robots.txt” warnings to catch issues early.