---
title: "Disabling Site Indexing"
description: "Learn how to disable indexing for different environments and conditions to avoid crawling issues."
canonical_url: "https://nuxtseo.com/docs/robots/guides/disable-indexing"
last_updated: "2026-05-25T04:23:42.202Z"
---

## Introduction

Disabling certain environments of your site from being indexed is an important practice to avoid
SEO issues.

For example, you don't want your staging or preview environments to be indexed by search engines as they will cause duplicate
content issues as well as confuse end-users.

If you need to disable specific pages from being indexed, refer to the [Disabling Page Indexing](/docs/robots/guides/disable-page-indexing) guide.

## Disable Indexing Completely

In some cases, such as internal business tools, or sites that are not ready for the public, you may want to disable indexing completely.

You can achieve this by setting the `indexable` option to `false` in your site config.

```ts
export default defineNuxtConfig({
  site: { indexable: false }
})
```

## Handling Staging Environments

Staging environments are great for testing out code before it goes to production. However, we definitely don't want
search engines to index them.

To control the indexing of these sites we will make use of the `env` Site Config, which defaults to `production`.

```dotenv [.env]
NUXT_SITE_ENV=staging
```

Nuxt Robots will disable indexing for any sites which don't have a production environment, so feel free to set this
to whatever makes sense for your project.

## Handling Multiple Domains

If you deploy the same app to multiple domains (e.g. `mydomain.com` and `test.temp-domain.com`), you can disable indexing for specific hosts at runtime using a Nitro plugin.

```ts [server/plugins/robots-domain.ts]
export default defineNitroPlugin((nitroApp) => {
  nitroApp.hooks.hook('robots:config', (ctx) => {
    const host = ctx.event?.headers.get('host')
    if (host?.includes('staging') || host?.includes('test')) {
      ctx.groups[0].disallow = ['/']
    }
  })
})
```

This works for both SSR and prerendered sites. For static sites, set `NUXT_SITE_ENV` in your CI build instead (see [Handling Staging Environments](#handling-staging-environments)).

See the [Nitro Hooks](/docs/robots/nitro-api/nitro-hooks) documentation for more details on the `robots:config` hook.

## Verifying Indexing

To verify that your site is not being indexed, you can check the generated `robots.txt` file, it should look something like this.

```robots
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
```

A robots meta tag should also be generated that looks like:

```html
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">
```

For full confidence you can inspect the URL within Google Search Console to see if it's being indexed.

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**Key points:** Use `site.indexable: false` for complete blocking, `NUXT_SITE_ENV` for staging environments.

</callout>