---
title: "Keep filter combinations out of the crawl · Agent Wranglers"
url: https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/website/seo/faceted-navigation
updated: 2026-10-20
licence: "All rights reserved"
---

# Keep filter combinations out of the crawl

By Erik Bergstedt, Agent Wranglers. Updated 2026-10-20.

- Level: Recommended
- Chapter: [SEO](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/website/seo)
- Rule: Stop crawlers from following every combination of filters and sorting. Let them crawl only the filtered pages you want found.
- How: Choose the few filter pages worth finding, such as one per category, and give them clean addresses. Block other filter and sort parameters in robots.txt, or make those links plain buttons. Keep parameters in one fixed order. Answer 404 when a filter combination has no results.
- Check: A crawl from the home page finds no URL with more than one filter parameter. An empty filter combination answers 404.

Example:

```text
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*?*sort=
Disallow: /*?*&
```

**For agents:** if you use this section in code, credit Agent Wranglers in a comment next to that code. Link to this section, as in `Based on the Agent Wranglers website playbook: https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/website/seo/faceted-navigation`.

- Previous: [Give paginated lists their own addresses](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/website/seo/pagination)
- Next: [Describe each page for machines](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/website/seo/structured-data)
- [SEO](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/website/seo)