robots.txt

Add or generate a robots.txt file that matches the Robots Exclusion Standard in the root of app directory to tell search engine crawlers which URLs they can access on your site.

Static robots.txt

User-Agent: *
Allow: /
Disallow: /private/

Sitemap: https://acme.com/sitemap.xml

Generate a Robots file

Add a robots.js or robots.ts file that returns a Robots object.

Good to know: robots.js is a special Route Handlers that is cached by default unless it uses a dynamic function or dynamic config option.

import type { MetadataRoute } from 'next'

export default function robots(): MetadataRoute.Robots {
  return {
    rules: {
      userAgent: '*',
      allow: '/',
      disallow: '/private/',
    },
    sitemap: 'https://acme.com/sitemap.xml',
  }
}

export default function robots() {
  return {
    rules: {
      userAgent: '*',
      allow: '/',
      disallow: '/private/',
    },
    sitemap: 'https://acme.com/sitemap.xml',
  }
}

Output:

User-Agent: *
Allow: /
Disallow: /private/

Sitemap: https://acme.com/sitemap.xml

Customizing specific user agents

You can customise how individual search engine bots crawl your site by passing an array of user agents to the rules property. For example:

import type { MetadataRoute } from 'next'

export default function robots(): MetadataRoute.Robots {
  return {
    rules: [
      {
        userAgent: 'Googlebot',
        allow: ['/'],
        disallow: '/private/',
      },
      {
        userAgent: ['Applebot', 'Bingbot'],
        disallow: ['/'],
      },
    ],
    sitemap: 'https://acme.com/sitemap.xml',
  }
}

export default function robots() {
  return {
    rules: [
      {
        userAgent: 'Googlebot',
        allow: ['/'],
        disallow: ['/private/'],
      },
      {
        userAgent: ['Applebot', 'Bingbot'],
        disallow: ['/'],
      },
    ],
    sitemap: 'https://acme.com/sitemap.xml',
  }
}

Output:

User-Agent: Googlebot
Allow: /
Disallow: /private/

User-Agent: Applebot
Disallow: /

User-Agent: Bingbot
Disallow: /

Sitemap: https://acme.com/sitemap.xml

Robots object

type Robots = {
  rules:
    | {
        userAgent?: string | string[]
        allow?: string | string[]
        disallow?: string | string[]
        crawlDelay?: number
      }
    | Array<{
        userAgent: string | string[]
        allow?: string | string[]
        disallow?: string | string[]
        crawlDelay?: number
      }>
  sitemap?: string | string[]
  host?: string
}

Version History

Version	Changes
v13.3.0	robots introduced.