Instructing Rover
How to tell Rover what to do on your site — one purpose sentence, guidance in your own words, page rules, and facts it may quote.
Where instructions live
Open Workspace, pick your site, and go to Customize. Two fields carry most of the weight:
- What does your business help people do?: one purpose sentence, up to 500 characters. Rover carries it into every request.
- Guidance in your own words — your full instructions, up to 24,576 characters. Tell Rover what to help with, what a good outcome looks like, and any boundaries.
Your full guidance stays private and preserved. Rover runs a bounded working version — up to 3,072 characters. When your guidance fits, it runs as written. When it is longer, you review a compact version before anything activates; your original stays preserved, word for word.
Instruction changes need no script update. The tag carries installation identity; behavior comes from your saved Workspace configuration. Saving in Customize is the publish. Rotating the production site key is the exception: update any snippet you copied into your site.
The pipeline
Every visitor request passes through the same layers, in order. Each layer is bounded, so write for the budget.
| Layer | What it does | Limit |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | One sentence Rover reads on every request. | 500 characters |
| Your guidance | Full instructions in your words. Private and preserved. | 24,576 characters |
| Working guidance | The bounded version Rover runs. Your text as written when it fits; a version you review when it does not. | 3,072 characters |
| Page rules | Narrow purpose and guidance by path. Pick how Rover starts and which model answers there. | 20 rules; 1,024 characters of extra guidance each |
| Knowledge | Facts Rover may state. | 8 entries; 1,000 characters each |
| Decline message | What Rover says to unrelated requests. | 500 characters |
Writing instructions that work
Write to Rover the way you would brief a new teammate on day one: the job, the outcome, the boundaries. Four patterns cover most of the difference between instructions that work and instructions that do not.
| Weak | Better | Why |
|---|---|---|
| “Help users.” | “Help visitors pick the right plan. When they ask about pricing, use the pricing Knowledge entry — never invent numbers.” | Rover aims at the outcome you name. A goal with no outcome gives it nothing to aim at. |
| One blanket instruction covering docs, pricing, and checkout. | A /docs rule for support — “diagnose from the page they are on” — and a /pricing rule for demos — “offer to show the feature live.” | The page a visitor is on tells Rover which job they came for. Page rules put the right guidance there. |
| “Mention our SOC 2 report when asked about security.” | A Knowledge entry titled “Security” holding the SOC 2 facts, plus: “Answer security questions from the Security entry.” | An instruction that points at facts Rover does not hold fails — or gets improvised. Put the claim where Rover can quote it. |
| “Help with anything visitors need.” | “Do three jobs: find the right doc, compare plans, book a demo.” Plus a decline message for the rest. | Naming the jobs also names what to decline. The decline message makes the boundary polite instead of improvised. |
Shorter is stronger
The working version is capped at 3,072 characters. Every sentence competes for that budget, so cut anything Rover can already see on the page.Page scopes
Add up to 20 page rules under Page-specific scopes. Each rule names up to 20 path prefixes, such as /, /pricing, or /account, plus a purpose for those pages (500 characters) and extra guidance (1,024 characters).
- The longest matching path wins. A visitor on
/pricing/enterprisegets the/pricingrule, not the/rule. - Page rules affect relevance and availability, never authorization. A rule on
/accountchanges which guidance and server actions are in play there — it grants no access to anything. - How Rover starts — per rule, Rover can act now, plan step by step, or choose automatically. Acting now is the default.
- Which model answers — Flash Lite is fast and economical (the default), Flash is stronger, Pro is for entitled sites only. Model choices here apply to requests your site makes on a visitor's behalf; when a visitor types or speaks to Rover directly, Rover uses Flash.
- Server actions per scope — each rule lists which of your server actions are available on those pages.
These rules are enforced, not advisory. A page can request a different start mode or model, but the request is clamped to what the matched rule allows.
When a request falls outside everything you described, Rover answers with your decline message — up to 500 characters, in your voice. For example: “I can help with this site and its product, but not with unrelated errands.”
Ground claims in Knowledge
Guidance says what to do. Knowledge says what is true. Any fact you want quoted exactly — a price, a limit, a certification, a date — belongs in a Knowledge entry, not buried in a paragraph of guidance. Then point guidance at the entry by name: “answer pricing questions from the Pricing entry.”
- Up to 8 entries, each with a title (80 characters) and body (1,000 characters).
- Entries share a rendered budget of 2,400 characters. Past the budget, whole entries are dropped — never cut mid-sentence — so trim until everything fits.
- Entries carry a type — pricing, a feature, proof and results, a common question — so pick the one that matches and keep one claim per entry.
Review, then it's live
Guidance that fits within 3,072 characters activates when you save. Longer guidance opens a review card first: long text is never silently truncated or activated. You edit or accept the compact working version, mark it reviewed, then save. Your original stays intact above it.
- Draft from my words — Rover compresses your guidance into a compact draft. It stays a draft until you review it.
- Talk it through with Rover — Rover asks one focused question at a time, then stages a reviewable policy in the editor. Staged drafts are never saved for you.
- Proposals from AI — instructions drafted by your own AI through Connect AI, or suggested by Rover itself, wait in the review inbox. You see before and after, then keep or discard each one.
Save direct edits; keep proposals
Your own edits change Rover only when you press Save. Rover drafts and outside proposals wait for an explicit review step, where you keep or discard them. Nothing is applied silently.