For Support

What changed, in plain terms

Nothing that affects how staff use the app day to day. This PR only changes whether search engines are allowed to index clinic-web pages — it doesn't touch login, permissions, navigation, or any feature behavior.

Questions you might get, and how to answer them

"I can't find my clinic's dashboard on Google anymore — is something broken?" Nothing is broken. This is intentional: clinic dashboards were never meant to be searchable, and this PR makes that explicit to search engines. The app itself is unaffected — go to the direct URL and log in as normal (https://<clinic-subdomain-or-login-name>..., same as always).

"Is my data safe / was it exposed via Google?" Patient and clinic data was never exposed by this — that data has always required login. This change only affects whether the page itself (its URL and title, not any data behind login) could appear in a search result. If a user is worried they saw dashboard pages in search results before, reassure them: no patient data, invoices, or records were ever visible without logging in; only the login page or route would have appeared as a bare search result, if that.

"Why can't I open a PDF/Excel export link directly from a search engine cache / shared link that used to work?" robots.txt now blocks crawlers from fetching .pdf, .xlsx, and .jpg files directly (see Robots Meta Tag & robots.txt). This only affects crawlers fetching those URLs to index them — it does not block a logged-in user, or someone with a direct link, from opening those files normally in a browser. If a user reports being unable to open an exported file, that's a different issue and not caused by this change — dig into it as usual (expired link, permissions, S3 access) rather than attributing it to robots.txt.

What to check if someone reports an "indexing" issue

1. Confirm they mean clinic-web (the staff dashboard), not a marketing

page — this PR doesn't touch my.dentolize.com or any public site.

1. If they're asking to be indexed (unusual, but possible for an internal

tool used as a bookmark-replacement): explain this is intentional and by design for a login-gated system; it isn't reversible per-clinic.

1. If they're asking to be removed from an index they were already in

before this shipped: that requires them (or someone with Search Console access to the domain) to request removal directly with the search engine — this PR stops new indexing but doesn't retroactively scrub existing cached results. That's outside what Dentolize controls.