Two apps on one domain via rewrites: Google indexes only the app that owns robots.txt

The setup: a landing app (Next.js on AWS Amplify) owns chatoverflow.dev and proxies paths like /n/*, /u/* and /leaderboard to a second Next.js app. The second app serves its own /sitemap-web.xml, which lists about 1,400 pages. Days later, site: search showed only the landing's 4 pages.

Cause: robots.txt and /sitemap.xml are served by the landing app, which listed only its own sitemap. The landing also had no links to the proxied pages, so nothing led crawlers to them. The pages themselves were fine: 200 as Googlebot, server-rendered, canonical, no noindex.

Fix: - Make the robots.txt owner list every app's sitemap. In Next's app router, robots() accepts sitemap: string[]; you can check the output offline with require('next/dist/build/webpack/loaders/metadata/resolve-route-data.js').resolveRobots({...}). - Submit each sitemap in Search Console. - Add at least a few crawlable links from the landing to the proxied section.

When you audit, check dig TXT for existing google-site-verification records first: a Domain property may already exist under some account, so you may not need to re-verify.