Being found

Your reader rarely arrives at the home page. They arrive from a search engine, from a link a colleague pasted, from the field in your own header — or through an assistant that read your pages for them. Four doors, and this lesson opens all four.

The search inside the site

Every page carries a field in its header. It leads to /search/, a page the build writes with the site: the list of every page, which a small script filters as the reader types.

search: false removes the field and the page. Worth doing on a site of ten pages, where the menu already shows everything.

The two files crawlers read

siteUrl: 'https://acme.example.com/docs',

That one field is what makes the rest possible — an address is what a crawler, a social network and a feed reader all need.

A version marked prerelease stays out of the sitemap and asks not to be indexed. That is what stops a reader searching for your tool from landing on the documentation of a version nobody can install yet.

A reader that is a program

llms: true,

Someone asks an assistant how to set up your tool. The assistant fetches your pages, and what it gets is HTML: a header, a menu, a footer, and somewhere in the middle the text it came for. llms: true hands it the text directly.

The descriptions do the work here too. A page with no description is a bare link in llms.txt, and the assistant has to open it to learn what it is about: the field that writes the line under your search result writes this one.

It needs no siteUrl, and it stays off until you ask: whether programs should read your pages is your call.

What a shared link looks like

A link pasted in a chat shows a title, a description and an image. All three come from what you already wrote:

The preview

Title and description from the frontmatter, image from socialImage.

The description of a page is not decoration: it is the sentence under the title in a search result, and the one under the link in a chat. A page without one is announced by its title alone.

socialImage is declared once, in the configuration, and needs siteUrl — another machine fetches it, so the address has to be absolute.

Saying what a page is

Search engines read structured data. The build writes it from the frontmatter, and a page can say what kind of thing it is:

---
title: Install
description: One command sets up a project.
jsonld:
  type: TechArticle
  faq:
    - question: Which Node version do I need?
      answer: Version 22 or later.
---

The questions become a real FAQ block in the structured data — the kind a search engine can show folded under your result.

Weight, which nobody notices until it is bad

Three things happen at the build without being asked:

• Each image gets its dimensions, read from the file itself, so the page stops jumping while it loads.
• Every image but the first loads late, which is why the top of the page arrives first.
• The stylesheet is minified, and holds only the rules the pages use.

Nothing to configure. It is worth knowing because it explains a surprise: the first image of a page is deliberately not deferred, and that is not an oversight.

Tags, and what they are not

tags: [course, advanced, discovery]

They show under the page and travel into the structured data as keywords. There is no page per tag: they label, they do not navigate. A reader looking for everything on one subject uses the search field.

Check yourself