diff --git a/app/controllers/application_controller.rb b/app/controllers/application_controller.rb
index 3c5b9f000..6a9b0ce82 100644
--- a/app/controllers/application_controller.rb
+++ b/app/controllers/application_controller.rb
@@ -17,6 +17,13 @@ class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
     redirect_to root_path
   end
 
+  # Bots/crawlers requesting non-HTML formats (e.g. text/plain) trigger
+  # MissingTemplate errors because we only have .html.erb templates.
+  # Return 406 Not Acceptable instead of a 500 error.
+  rescue_from ActionView::MissingTemplate do
+    head :not_acceptable
+  end
+
   private
 
   def after_sign_out_path_for(resource_or_scope)
diff --git a/public/robots.txt b/public/robots.txt
index c19f78ab6..7c2a9cbe5 100644
--- a/public/robots.txt
+++ b/public/robots.txt
@@ -1 +1,12 @@
-# See https://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html for documentation on how to use the robots.txt file
+User-agent: *
+Allow: /workshops
+Allow: /resources
+Allow: /stories
+Allow: /community_news
+Allow: /events
+Allow: /tutorials
+Allow: /faqs
+Allow: /contact_us
+Allow: /tags
+Allow: /story_shares
+Disallow: /