The Robot Exclusion Protocol, also known as robots.txt, is a standard used by websites to communicate with web crawlers and other web robots about which parts of the site should not be processed. Websites place a robots.txt file in their root directory to specify rules for web crawlers, indicating which pages or directories should be excluded from crawling. This protocol helps website owners manage web traffic from automated bots and protect sensitive or irrelevant content from being indexed. Respecting the robots.txt file is an important aspect of ethical web scraping, ensuring compliance with website policies and legal regulations.