If you’ve ever tried to crawl Tabelog (食べログ), Japan’s most authoritative restaurant review platform, you’ve met its first line of defense. It’s not a CAPTCHA. It’s not an IP ban. It’s a deceptively simple text file: https://tabelog.com/robots.txt .
/rvw/ (reviews) and /photo/ (user-uploaded images) are fully disallowed. Why? Because Tabelog’s value is user-generated trust. If Google indexed every review page, scrapers could steal structured opinions and star ratings without ever touching the site. Blocking them doesn’t stop determined scrapers, but it raises the bar. tabelog robots.txt
For developers and data scientists, Tabelog is a "white whale" of data. Its rating system—where a score of is considered excellent and 4.0+ is elite—is the gold standard for dining in Japan. However, the robots.txt serves as a legal and technical warning: If you’ve ever tried to crawl Tabelog (食べログ),
While the specific content of Tabelog’s robots.txt can change to reflect new site features, it typically includes these standard fields: How Google Interprets the robots.txt Specification It’s a deceptively simple text file: https://tabelog
: The file often contains specific blocks for various crawlers. While standard search engines like Googlebot are generally allowed to index restaurant pages, "rogue" or aggressive commercial bots are often explicitly blocked to maintain site performance.