Preventing direct access to robots.txt through .htaccess

Question

I want to prevent users from accessing my robots.txt file but I still want search engines to read it. Is it possible? If yes then how do I do it? I believe if I write following in .htaccess it will work but I am afraid it will also block search engines from accessing it.

order deny, allow deny from all

Thanks

Answer 1

Since standard robots.txt is served from the root of your domain unless you can somehow reliably distinguish search engines from users I don't think what you are asking is possible.

You could try filtering by user agent or possibly by IP range.

Is there a reason why you don't want your users to not see what is in your robots.txt file? After all everything in that file is public.