Hello, I know I can use robots.txt but I'd like to mess with a more immediate solution. I tried something like this, but then when I went to view it in browser, it gave 404 so I think my code is wrong. I placed this in the server block in /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/example.com.

# Block some bots from everything in this directory
location = /schedule/ {
   if ($http_user_agent ~* "Googlebot|bingbot") {
       return 403;
   } 
} 

It's probably not working because you have quotes around the things you want to block
Try

if ($http_user_agent ~* (googlebot|bingbot) ) {
    return 403;
}