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 Handler that is cached by default unless it uses a Request-time API 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 customize 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

Non-standard directives

Some search engines support directives that aren't part of the Robots Exclusion Standard, such as Request-Rate (Seznam) or Clean-param (Yandex). Pass these through the other field on a rule. Keys preserve their casing and array values emit one line per entry, scoped to the rule's User-Agent block.

import type { MetadataRoute } from 'next'

export default function robots(): MetadataRoute.Robots {
  return {
    rules: [
      { userAgent: '*', allow: '/' },
      {
        userAgent: 'SeznamBot',
        allow: '/',
        other: {
          'Request-Rate': '10/1m',
        },
      },
    ],
  }
}

export default function robots() {
  return {
    rules: [
      { userAgent: '*', allow: '/' },
      {
        userAgent: 'SeznamBot',
        allow: '/',
        other: {
          'Request-Rate': '10/1m',
        },
      },
    ],
  }
}

Output:

User-Agent: *
Allow: /

User-Agent: SeznamBot
Allow: /
Request-Rate: 10/1m

Good to know: Values in other are passed through verbatim. Next.js does not validate directive names or values, so refer to the target search engine's documentation for the exact syntax.

Robots object

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

Version History

Source: docs/01-app/03-api-reference/03-file-conventions/01-metadata/robots.mdx