# Blind Trust — robots.txt
# Allow well-behaved crawlers to index public pages. The API routes
# return JSON, not HTML, so they're not useful for SEO; the SPA HTML
# shell is the same on every public route, but route-specific OG card
# generation lives at /api/og (and Vercel pre-renders meta tags from
# there for crawlers that respect them).

User-agent: *
Allow: /
Allow: /votes
Allow: /votes/
Allow: /leaderboard
Allow: /late-filers
Allow: /wall-of-shame
Allow: /today
Allow: /politicians/
Allow: /leagues
Allow: /privacy
Allow: /terms
Allow: /faq
Allow: /legend
Allow: /news
Allow: /news/
Allow: /polyplays
Allow: /polyplays/
Allow: /blotter
Allow: /dunks
Allow: /dunks/
Allow: /press
Allow: /about/beltway-alpha
Allow: /about/sean-baptiste
Allow: /methodology
Allow: /corrections
Allow: /editorial-standards
Allow: /ticker
Allow: /ticker/
Allow: /stock-act
Allow: /how-congress-trades-stocks

# JSON APIs — fine to crawl but they're not blog posts
Disallow: /api/admin
Disallow: /api/auth
Disallow: /api/me

# Heavy / paginated endpoints — discourage deep crawl
Crawl-delay: 5

# Sitemaps. We only submit INDEXABLE URLs here.
#   sitemap.xml           — evergreen top-level routes (index,follow)
#   sitemap-articles.xml  — every live editorial article (index,follow)
#   news-sitemap.xml      — Google-News feed, last 48h only (by spec)
Sitemap: https://www.blindtrust.io/sitemap.xml
Sitemap: https://www.blindtrust.io/api/sitemap-articles.xml
Sitemap: https://www.blindtrust.io/api/news-sitemap.xml
# Removed 2026-06-01 (AdSense Lever 1): sitemap-politicians.xml +
# sitemap-tickers.xml. Those /politicians/ and /ticker/ pages are
# noindex,follow at the page level, so submitting them here generated
# ~1,771 "Submitted URL marked noindex" errors in Search Console. The
# routes now return 410 Gone (same treatment as the dunks sitemap,
# removed 2026-05-07). Pages stay crawlable for link discovery; just
# not indexed as ranking pages until Lever 2 gives them unique content.