If you don't want a site to be indexed by search engines you must place a robots.txt file. Typically you don't want anything indexed except production sites.

Today Spatie released a new package called laravel-robots-middleware. It was coded up by my colleague Sebastian. Instead of you having to create a robots.txt this Laravel package will add a x-robots-tag to every request. If you want to limit a search bot to only crawl your production enviroment you can extend the Spatie\RobotsMiddleware\RobotsMiddleware-class like this:

// app/Http/Middleware/MyRobotsMiddleware.php

use Illuminate\Http\Request;
use Spatie\RobotsMiddleware\RobotsMiddleware;

class MyRobotsMiddleware extends RobotsMiddleware
{
    /**
     * @return string|bool
     */
    protected function shouldIndex(Request $request)
    {
        return app()->environment('production');
    }
}

To learn all the options read the documentation on GitHub. Like this package? Then maybe some of our other Laravel packages might be useful to you as well.