# robots.txt for cope.com
# See https://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html
#
# A marketing site earns its value by being read, so this is deliberately open.
# AI crawlers are allowed on purpose: AI-search visibility is the point of this
# property. Blocking GPTBot, ClaudeBot or Google-Extended would remove COPE from
# the answers we are trying to appear in.
#
# Deliberately NOT blocked: /thank-you and /success/*. Those five confirmation
# pages are thin duplicates and should not be indexed — but the fix is a noindex
# tag on each page, not a Disallow here. A crawler blocked by robots.txt never
# fetches the page, so it never sees the noindex, and an already-indexed URL can
# never be removed. Blocking them here would also contradict the sitemap, which
# still submits them. Handle those pages in Framer: Page Settings → uncheck
# "Show page in search engines", and drop them from the sitemap.
#
# Editing note: a blank line ends a group. Keep every rule in one unbroken block
# under the User-agent line, or the rules after the gap are silently dropped.
User-agent: *
# Tracking parameters — duplicate URLs, no unique content, never in the sitemap.
Disallow: /*?*utm_
Disallow: /*?*fbclid=
Disallow: /*?*gclid=
Allow: /

# Verified live on 14 Aug 2026 against the file Framer already served.
# This is the www host — do not "correct" it to the apex.
Sitemap: https://www.cope.com/sitemap.xml