Customize
The instructions Rover follows and the tools it may use on your site — create, review, test, and hand work off.
Customize holds two things: the policy Rover follows on your site, and the actions it may take. Your own edits go live when you press Save. Rover drafts and outside proposals stay staged until you review them.
What Rover should handle
Set the business purpose once, then narrow guidance by page. This page covers the fields; the writing craft lives in Instructing Rover.
| Field | What it does | Limit |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | One line on what your business helps people do. | 500 characters |
| Guidance in your own words | What to help with, what a good outcome looks like, and any boundaries. Your full source stays private and preserved. | 24,576 characters |
| Decline message | How Rover turns down unrelated requests. | 500 characters |
Guidance longer than 3,072 characters is never silently truncated or activated. Rover shows a bounded runtime version — edit it, then press Use this reviewed draft to make it active. Draft from my words produces a compact Flash Lite draft the same way: it waits for your review, and your original words are unchanged.
Page scopes, routing, and model
Every site starts with one rule covering every page. Add up to 20 page rules; the longest matching path wins. Page rules affect relevance and availability, never authorization.
- Path prefixes — up to 20 per rule, such as
/pricingor/account. - Purpose and extra guidance for those pages: 500 characters for purpose and 1,024 for route guidance.
- How Rover should start — Act now, Plan step by step, or Choose automatically.
- Model tier — Flash Lite (fast and economical), Flash (stronger), or Pro (entitled sites only).
- Allowed alternatives — which other routings and model tiers the page may request. The default is always allowed.
- Server actions available in this scope — pick which of your server-side actions Rover may call on these pages.
Defaults: requests your site initiates start with Act now on Flash Lite. Visitors who type or speak to Rover directly use Flash.
Actions Rover can take
Actions come in three kinds. All are stored privately for your site — webhook URLs, server code, and secrets never ship in the public page script.
| Kind | Where it runs | What to know |
|---|---|---|
| Server webhook | Rover's servers call your endpoint | Requests are signed (x-rtrvr-signature) and carry an idempotency key. POST or GET, 10-second default timeout, 16,000-byte response cap. Rotate the signing secret any time. |
| Run in visitor browser | JavaScript on your page, in the visitor's active session | Runs only when your page registers a matching handler. Always asks the visitor first. Never put secrets in browser code. |
| Server code | Rover Code Sandbox — an isolated service on Rover's side | Bounded JavaScript with scoped secrets, run through the sandbox — never inside Rover's main backend. Same 10-second default timeout and 16,000-byte response cap as webhooks. Always asks the visitor first. |
Server code runs sandboxed
Server-code actions run through Rover Code Sandbox — an isolated service, never inside Rover's main backend. Keep the code bounded, use scoped secrets only through the sandbox context, and run a test before you turn it on.Browser actions require the page to register a handler:
rover.registerTool({
name: "run_browser_action",
description: "Handle this Rover action inside your page.",
parameters: { type: "object", properties: { action: { type: "string" } } },
handlerName: "run_browser_action"
}, async (args) => {
// This runs in the visitor browser session. Keep secrets on your server.
return { ok: true, received: args };
});Browser and server-code actions always ask the visitor before running, and so do actions whose name or description reads as support or account work. You can require confirmation on any action.
Settings every action shares
- Data to send — a JSON Schema for the inputs Rover collects and passes to the action.
- When to run — Auto picks after success for webhooks and during the task for code actions; you can pin either.
- Available on these pages — up to 20 path prefixes. Empty means the whole site; authorization is always checked separately.
- Priority — −100 to 100. Higher-priority actions are shown first when a page has many tools.
Six templates get you started: Slack lead alert, Create CRM lead, Support ticket, Call my webhook, Run in visitor browser, and Run server code. An action shows Live when it is on and wired up — webhook URL set, browser code in place, or server code present. Switched off, it shows Off; anything still missing setup shows Waiting on setup.
Testing an action
- 1.Save the action first — server tests run against the saved version.
- 2.Edit the test inputs as JSON. Templates come with sample inputs filled in.
- 3.Press Run test. The result renders as JSON right in the editor.
Browser actions use Validate browser code instead — it checks the code is publishable and lists errors before anything ships. Published browser bundles are versioned and load alongside the Rover script.
AI drafts and the review gate
AI helps in three places here, and all of them are review-first:
- Describe with AI — describe an action in plain words; Rover drafts the name, inputs, and code for you to review and save. Placeholder endpoint URLs are cleared so you enter your real one.
- Draft from my words and Talk it through with Rover — instruction drafts stage into the policy editor. Nothing is active until you save.
- Copy for AI / Paste a reply — copy a handoff brief for any outside AI, then paste its JSON reply back (up to 128 KB). It stages for review; unsupported fields are ignored and named. Nothing is saved or executed by pasting.
Suggestions from site scans, the curator, and outside tools land as pending changes in the Workspace review inbox. The inbox shows the exact count and every waiting change; you keep or discard each one. Writes are versioned: if your setup moved since a suggestion was drafted, the review names the areas that changed, and a draft that no longer fits must be discarded rather than half-applied.