App Router (Next.js)
App Router is the routing system of Next.js, where the folder structure in the `app/` directory directly determines the website’s URL structure.
It replaced the older Pages Router. Key property: each route can independently decide whether to render statically (SSG) or dynamically (SSR) on the server, and it can combine server components with client components where interactivity is needed.
Practical consequence for website architecture: shared elements (navigation, footer) can be defined once in `layout.tsx` and are applied automatically to all subpages in that folder - without copying code onto each page separately. This website uses exactly this pattern: a route group for subpages outside the homepage, with shared navigation and footer from one place.
For SEO, App Router has built-in support for generating `sitemap.xml`, `robots.txt`, and meta tags directly from the page’s code - canonical URLs, Open Graph images, and titles are generated programmatically from real data rather than copied by hand onto each page.
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