SEO and AI search
Done for you, on every build.
Search engines and AI assistants both need the same basics: a clear title and summary for each page, an honest address, and a map of the site. vagejs writes these on every build, so you don't have to remember them, and vage check stops the build when one goes missing.
On every page
From the title and description in a page's frontmatter, vagejs adds:
| Tag | Why it matters |
|---|---|
<title> and meta description |
What people see in search results |
| Canonical URL | Tells search engines which address is the real one |
Open Graph tags (og:title, og:description, og:url, og:image, og:site_name) |
The preview card when someone shares the link |
twitter:card |
A large image card when the page has an image |
robots: noindex |
Only on pages where you set noindex: true |
If your layout already writes one of these, vagejs leaves yours alone.
Structured data (JSON-LD)
Structured data describes a page in a format search engines read directly. vagejs adds WebSite data to the home page and Article data to posts with type: article, including the author and date when the page lists them. Organization data is opt-in, because only you know the facts:
seo: {
structuredData: {
organization: { name: "Acme Studio", url: "https://acme.example", logo: "/logo.png" },
},
},vage check reports structured data that is broken or doesn't match the page.
Sitemap and robots.txt
sitemap.xml lists every published page and leaves out drafts and noindex pages. robots.txt allows every crawler by default and points to the sitemap. Both need site in vage.config.ts.
AI crawlers
Some AI companies use separate crawlers for training their models and for answering questions in AI search. You can treat them differently:
seo: {
robots: { aiTraining: "disallow", aiSearch: "allow" },
},aiTrainingcovers GPTBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended.aiSearchcovers OAI-SearchBot and Claude-SearchBot.
Nothing changes until you set them. The crawler names come from each company's own documentation, and npx vage guidelines shows the source and the date it was last checked. Keep in mind that robots.txt is a polite request: well-behaved crawlers follow it, but it doesn't lock anything.
llms.txt
llms.txt is a short, plain-text guide to your site for AI tools: your site's name, its description and a list of pages with their summaries. vagejs writes it on every build. Turn on llmsTxt: { full: true } to also write llms-full.txt, which contains the full text of every listed page.
llms.txt is a proposed convention, not a search-engine standard. It costs nothing to publish, and some AI tools read it, but don't expect it to change your Google rankings.
Telling search engines about changes
After you publish, npx vage indexnow --changed-since HEAD~1 tells IndexNow search engines (such as Bing) which pages changed. It asks before sending anything. For Google, add your sitemap in Search Console. vage connect gsc and vage report search then bring your search data into the terminal.
What vagejs can't do for you
Good tooling removes mistakes. It can't make a page worth ranking. Search engines and AI assistants still reward pages that answer a real question clearly, show who wrote them, and are kept up to date. Write for the person reading, and let vagejs handle the details.