GEO in Ghost

Back in July, Ghost launched some features to support GEO. What are these features and what are they doing for your site right now?

GEO, if you're not familiar with it is, "Generative Engine Optimisation"—helping content to get found, indexed, and used by LLMs. So, it's SEO for AI; it's all about getting your content to find favour with LLMs, and for them to use you as a source in their output.

Ghost's GEO features

Announced on July 16th 2026, the new GEO features "optimize your site for AI search" by adding a new llms.txt file and creating text-only versions of your posts, saved in Markdown (.md) files.

llms.txt is like a sitemap for agents (Ghost actually has two files—a shorter llms.txt has recent content and is backed by llms-full.txt) and the .md files are lightweight versions of your content with some structured agent-friendly metadata.

Do the features help my site get cited by LLMs?

LLMs are doing just fine reading websites that don't have GEO in place, and having GEO isn't a magic bullet to have Claude bring your ideas to a bigger audience. But I guess it won't hurt!?

llms.txt and .md versions are currently much lower priority for GEO than more classic SEO ideas:

• write well,
• about interesting things,
• and network your links in a high-energy but natural and organic way.

Put another way, right now, the more popular and authoritative your content is the more likely it is to be found and ranked, so the more likely it is to be shown in search engine results / used in LLM outputs. Here's some further reading on this (counter arguments might be available, let me know!).

What is definitely true is that llms.txt and .md versions do have efficiency for machine reading because the cruft of the website (branding, navigation, other page furniture) is stripped away, leaving just the juice of your content. That appeals to old heads like me who grew up optimising online things and like things to be done neatly but it sounds like it's not going to pay off hugely just yet.

So these GEO features are a bit of a bet. The bet is that AI services will begin to privilege sites that offer efficiencies to them, and nicely readable content is a good efficiency. That’s a good bet as we’ve seen this pattern over the years with SEO where it's quite accepted that efficient planning for crawl and more performant sites get some advantages in page rank. So… I'd say it’s a matter of "case not proven” right now for llms.txt and .md versions of pages. And as bets go, the cost of your stake here is zero: the tools are there, if you want the, switch them on.

How will I know if these features are helping?

Ghost's analytics can tell you if you're getting visits via AI services, but it's not going to show you if your site is seeing crawls against the .md files and llms.txt. This means that on Ghost(Pro) you might struggle to validate how effective the features are in improving your work’s visibility to LLMs, as you don't have access to raw stat logs. It’s a different story outside of Ghost(Pro) where your setup might allow access to other logs.

In terms of my own current work within the Ghost ecosystem, I like that these GEO features are there but I’m not investing a lot of my time or my project partners’ time in worrying about them today. Throwing the switch for the features to “on" is very low effort, and has possible but unproven use today. It might be more useful in the future.

So what's the point in this?

My take on these GEO features in Ghost is that they’re interesting, have potential for the future, and show that the core team is engaged and forward looking on this topic. But it’s frontier work, with limited current utility. It is going to be of interest to folks who are tinkerers, looking forward to the future. The core team are still working in this area, having added an early version of machine payments behind a feature flag back in August —it looks like this will allow LLMs to buy access to payment-gated content. Interesting stuff.

A final note

The SEO-world has been one of the more snake oil ends of the web industry since any of us started making money on the web, and my bet would be that the GEO world will follow suit (not least because a lot of the voices will cross over to this new domain, especially while it has a buzz). There will be a lot of contradictory advice. Expect a lot of ideas to take hold that will never be discarded despite evidence. Hold your nose. And most of all, where contradictions arise, it will pay to listen more to what the LLM services consuming your content are saying than following GEO thought leaders.

Good luck out there!