For decades, search engines like Google have been a major source of traffic for publishers. Ghost has long included built-in SEO tools to help your site appear in search results, automatically handling structured metadata and sitemaps.
More recently, people have increasingly started using new AI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude to answer their questions and discover new sources of information. Large Language Models (LLMs) search the web and reference sources they use to answer a user's queries.
As you might expect, new practices have emerged for website owners who want their site to be more likely to be cited and referenced in AI searches - sometimes referred to as GEO, or Generative Engine Optimization.
Ghost now includes built-in GEO tools that generate the files AI systems expect and provide Markdown versions of your public content, which you can activate in your admin panel under Settings → Meta data
When enabled, Ghost will output a new file at the root of your domain called llms.txt - and serve Markdown versions of your posts when .md is appended to the URL.
For example:
- https://ghost.org/changelog/llms.txt
- https://ghost.org/changelog/llms-full.txt
- https://ghost.org/changelog/geo.md
Much like SEO, these new GEO tools help AI agents discover, read and understand your content more easily and efficiently, making it more likely to be referenced when responding to user queries.
Only publicly available content is included. Members-only and paid posts are listed with their public title and excerpt, but their protected content is not. Private sites don’t serve these files at all.
We understand that not everyone wants to engage with AI, so this feature is off by default for existing sites. If you'd like to enable it, simply toggle it on in Settings. Otherwise, there's nothing you need to do; it will remain switched off.
Ghost(Pro) users can log in and start enjoying all of this right away! If you're a developer, self-hosting Ghost, you'll need to update to the latest version to get access to everything that's new.