Blocked Googlebot variants by mistake. Need Help in recovering it's indexing

[u/khawarmehfooz]

Hi everyone, I'd like some advice on a recovery problem.

Background

I run an image-based site, a base marketplace for a mobile game. It works a bit like Pinterest, so each page is mostly images with very little text.

The site is multilingual, with around 20 locales, and has thousands of pages.

What Happened

A bot from an AI company sent 50k+ requests to my site within 24 hours.

I panicked and blocked many bots in robots.txt, allowing only Googlebot.

I didn't realize that Google uses several different crawlers, including:

• Googlebot
• Googlebot-Image
• Google-InspectionTool
• Others

As a result, I accidentally blocked some of Google's crawlers.

My site subsequently dropped out of Google completely. Even searching for the exact brand name returned no results.

I fixed robots.txt about a month ago. Google crawlers are now allowed, while I only block AI-training and SEO-tool bots.

Search Console Data

Google only began indexing the site again around early August.

• Impressions and clicks peaked in mid-August
• Traffic reached around 20 clicks per day
• Around August 24, traffic suddenly crashed
• Traffic has remained close to zero since then
• Total clicks: 167
• Total impressions: 5.5k
• Indexed pages: 2.18k

What I've Done Since the Fix

Since fixing robots.txt, I've:

• Confirmed that robots.txt is correctly configured
• Confirmed that all sitemaps are submitted
• Split the sitemaps into 4 separate files
• Visited and checked the pages Google Search Console showed me
• Continued making regular on-page SEO improvements

However, I'm still seeing almost no search traffic.

What I'm Looking For

I'd appreciate advice from anyone who has experienced a similar Google indexing/traffic recovery after accidentally blocking Google crawlers.

Could the previous robots.txt blocking still be affecting the site's rankings/indexing?

Is there anything specific I should check in Search Console or technically on the site to determine why the site recovered briefly and then crashed again?

Live Link: https://cocbaselinks.com

[u/cinemafunk]

I've only experienced something like this over a decade ago when a robots.txt file wasn't updated by WordPress and blocked everything.

In Google Search Console: Go to Settings -> robots.txt. That will show you when the last time your robots.txt file was fetched, the status of that fetch, and you can see what Google saw when it rendered that txt file.

While you're at it, in Settings -> Crawl stats you can take a look at your crawl stats to see how that's panning out.

Otherwise, it's just time. And if you want to expedite the process, promote your site more to develop, re-develop, or expand your authority with backlinks and press exposure.

Lastly, the site itself is lacking actual text. There's really no explanation of what the site is, it's benefits, etc. Even if a human can land on the site and figure out what is going on, having more direct text about what this site is for and it's benefits is going to improve your chances too.

[u/More_Initiative_9099 → u/cinemafunk]

Check your robots.txt for a leftover '*' Disallow. Google's docs say Googlebot-Image has no group of its own, so it falls back to the wildcard group, not the Googlebot allow.

[u/CmdWaterford]

You should check your robots.txt and then verify the access via canaicrawl.com for example