Skip to main content

SEO

Every published Control site ships with the basics search
engines need to discover and rank your pages: a sitemap.xml,
a robots.txt, and a <link rel="canonical"> tag on every page.
There's nothing to wire up — it all happens at build time using
data already in your project.

What you get out of the box​

  • https://your-domain.com/sitemap.xml — lists every published
    page in your project with the latest lastmod timestamp.
  • https://your-domain.com/robots.txt — declares the sitemap
    location and allows all crawlers by default.
  • <link rel="canonical"> and <meta property="og:url"> on
    every rendered page, pointing at the canonical URL.

The sitemap and robots files are regenerated on every npm run build
via a prebuild step. The canonical tags are emitted by the SDK
during static export.

How the canonical URL is resolved​

Control resolves the canonical site origin in this order:

  1. The SITE_URL environment variable, if set.
  2. The primary domain configured for your project in the CMS
    (Project Dashboard -> Domains). This is the domain marked
    as primary in your website settings.
  3. If neither is available (e.g. the site has not been published
    yet), the canonical tag and sitemap generation are skipped
    silently and the build continues.

In most cases you don't need to do anything — once your site has a
primary domain, the right URL is used automatically.

Overriding with SITE_URL​

Add a SITE_URL environment variable to override the API-discovered domain:

SITE_URL=https://example.com

SITE_URL controls both the sitemap entries and the canonical tags,
so they stay in sync. Set it when you want to:

  • Test SEO output against a staging domain before pointing DNS.
  • Use a domain that isn't (yet) registered as primary in the CMS.
  • Override the primary domain for any other reason.

When unset, the API-discovered primary domain is used.

You can add this variable from your Project Dashboard. See
Adding custom env variables for details.

What gets included in the sitemap​

The generated sitemap contains every page in your project, except:

  • Pages that were set as drafts.
  • Pages with password protection enabled.

Adding custom-coded pages​

If your repo has routes that aren't Control pages (for example a
custom Next.js page at /templates), they won't appear in the
sitemap automatically. Include them with the --extra flag on
the generate-sitemap script in package.json:

"generate-sitemap": "cntrl-sdk generate-sitemap -o public --extra templates,tutorials"

You can also set a SITEMAP_EXTRA_PATHS environment variable
instead of (or in addition to) the flag:

SITEMAP_EXTRA_PATHS=templates,tutorials

Paths are comma-separated slugs without a leading slash. They are
merged with Control pages and deduplicated. Unlike Control pages,
extra paths are always included — they aren't filtered by draft
or password-protection status.

You can add SITEMAP_EXTRA_PATHS from your Project Dashboard. See
Adding custom env variables for details.

Verifying it works​

Once deployed, you can verify:

  • Open https://your-domain.com/sitemap.xml — you should see
    your pages listed.
  • Open https://your-domain.com/robots.txt — should declare your
    sitemap URL.
  • View the page source on any published page — look for
    <link rel="canonical"> in the <head>.

Submitting to search engines​

Once the sitemap is live, submit it to:

Both tools will start crawling and indexing your pages within a few
days, and surface useful diagnostics about which pages were indexed,
which were skipped, and why.