Your robots.txt asks every crawler to stay away from the whole site

What we observed

Your robots.txt contains a rule that disallows everything for every crawler:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Why it matters

This is not an AI problem. This is your whole site asking every search engine and every crawler to stay away, which affects Google before it affects anything else.

Almost always, this is left over from a staging site (a private test copy of your site). WordPress has a setting — Settings → Reading → “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” — that produces exactly this rule. It often stays switched on when the site goes live, more often than anyone would like.

If your Google traffic has been poor and you couldn’t work out why, this is very likely the whole explanation, and it takes five seconds to fix.

How to fix it

First, check the WordPress setting. Settings → Reading → uncheck “Discourage search engines from indexing this site.” On most sites that is the entire cause and the entire fix.

If that box is already unchecked, the rule is coming from somewhere else:

• A real robots.txt file in your site’s root folder — open it and remove the Disallow: / line
• An SEO plugin’s robots editor
• Your host’s staging configuration, if this site was recently cloned

One deliberate exception: if this really is a staging site that should stay out of search results, leave it alone. The rule is doing its job. Better still, put the site behind a password (HTTP authentication). A password actually keeps visitors and crawlers out, while robots.txt only politely asks them to stay away.

How to check it worked

curl -s https://example.com/robots.txt

The User-agent: * group should no longer contain Disallow: /. Then check Google Search Console — under Pages, the “Blocked by robots.txt” count should start falling over the following days. Recovery is not instant, because Google has to visit your pages again first.