Do I need robots.txt?

Question

I want to allow all bots to crawl everything, do I need to create a robots.txt?

If the file is missing will it have a negative influence on some crawlers?

If I need to create it, what should it look like?

Answer 1

You do not need one as not having one is interpreted as meaning you want to have all of your content crawled. But I recommend using a blank one just to prevent the accumulation of unnecessary 404 errors in your stats.