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When you have preview environments, you don’t want search engines indexing them and diluting the SEO of your production site. Search engine indexers are told to ignore all preview environments. When you’re ready to go live, give your production environment a custom domain and then set it to be visible to search engines. To change your production environment’s visibility to search engines, follow these steps:
To not restrict indexers on your production environment, run the following command:
upsun environment:info --environment <VariableBlock name="PRODUCTION_ENVIRONMENT_NAME" /> restrict_robots false
Upsun can’t guarantee that indexers follow the instructions. If you’re concerned about access, set up HTTP access control.

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How it’s done

When the Hide from search engines is activated, search engines are turned away from environments by including a X-Robots-Tag header: 
X-Robots-Tag: noindex, nofollow
That tells search engine indexers to not index these sites and not traverse links from these sites. This helps keep non-Production sites out of search engine indexes. It’s automatically on for all upsun.site domains, and it’s automatically off for production environments with a custom domain.

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Alternative method

You can also send instructions to search engine indexers using a robots.txt file. Your app can serve this as a static file from its disk or as a dynamic response from its passthru. Control either with the location section of your app configuration. If your robots.txt file includes instructions to ignore a page, search engine indexers may ignore it even if you have configured Upsun to not send the header.
Last modified on March 10, 2026