: What is the .well-known/ directory and how should I set it up? In my Webmaster's Tools crawl errors I have a few access denied locations: .well-known/apple-app-site-association .well-known/assetlinks.json

@Heady270

RFC 5785 can be paraphrased:


If you create a new URL such as robots.txt or favicon.ico that is expected to be at a certain place on every website, you shall henceforth make such a URL start with /.well-known/.

Furthermore, you will register all such URLs with the IETF so that there is a big central list of all these URLs.


The registry appears to be here: www.iana.org/assignments/well-known-uris/well-known-uris.xhtml You can look through the registry, decide if any of the requested URLs serve a purpose that would help your site, and create documents if some would be useful.

Of the URLs that you mention in your question, only assetlinks.json appears to be registered properly.

There is generally no reason to create documents just because Google reports them as 404. Google expects to get 404 errors on sites. They even consider it a sign of a healthy site that URLs without documents return the correct status (404).

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