18 Mar, 2026

How to hide your blog from search engines and the discovery feed

Bear is designed for public blogging, but sometimes you want a private space.

Step 1: Hide posts from the discovery feed

Each post has a make_discoverable attribute which controls whether it appears on the Bear discovery feed. Set it to false in the attribute section of your post:

title: My private post
make_discoverable: false
---
This post won't appear on the discovery feed.

If you have many posts, you'll need to set this on each one individually.

Step 2: Add it to your post template

Rather than setting make_discoverable: false on every single post, you can add it to your post template so that all new posts are private by default.

Go to Settings > Post template and add make_discoverable: false to the template attributes:

title: 
make_discoverable: false
___

Every new post you create will now have make_discoverable set to false automatically.

Note: This only applies to new posts. You'll still need to update any existing posts manually.

Step 3: Block search engines with robots.txt

Hiding from the discovery feed doesn't prevent search engines from indexing your blog. To block crawlers, go to Settings > Advanced and set your robots.txt to:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

This tells all search engine crawlers not to index any page on your blog.

What this doesn't do

These steps make your blog practically invisible. It won't show up on the discovery feed or in search results. However, anyone with a direct link to your blog can still read it.