Routing is a fundamental part of delivering applications, but it’s often treated as an afterthought—tacked onto the caching layer and configured through complex YAML or manual click-ops. This can introduce friction for teams, increase the risk of misconfigurations, and slow down deployments, especially as applications grow in complexity.
Vercel takes a different approach: routing is built into the platform as an application-aware gateway that understands your codebase. This unlocks a range of capabilities that simplify development by reducing configuration overhead, minimizing latency, and enabling more advanced architectures.
The gateway has full context of your deployments, domains, and logic. It supports standard routing and custom rules, but goes beyond reverse proxying by interpreting application logic in real time to make smarter decisions, like skipping unnecessary compute.
Here’s how Vercel routes requests—and why it makes building performant, complex apps easier.