AI crawlers allowed in robots.txt
Ghost serves robots.txt from your active theme — add or edit robots.txt in the theme's root and re-upload it. There is no setting for it in Ghost admin.
Site platforms
Ghost, and what an answer engine can read of it
Ghost starts further along than most: it emits Organization and Article JSON-LD without being asked, server-renders everything, and sets canonicals and meta descriptions properly. A Ghost site with nothing configured usually passes six of the eight checks.
The one that surprises people is robots.txt, because there is no setting for it in Ghost admin — it comes from the active theme. Change theme and your robots.txt changes with it, which is a coupling nobody expects until a redesign silently drops the file.
How we recognise it: a Ghost generator tag, or an X-Ghost-Cache-Status response header. Run the free readiness check and the fixes it gives you are the Ghost ones below.
What to do
1.Put robots.txt and llms.txt in the theme, together
robots.txt goes in the theme root; llms.txt goes in the theme's /public directory, which Ghost serves from the site root. Keeping both in the theme means they travel with it — and it is why a theme swap can take them away without warning.
Theme layout
your-theme/ robots.txt public/ llms.txt2.Extend the Organization block rather than replacing it
Ghost generates one from Publication settings, with sameAs carrying only the Facebook and Twitter fields it collects. If your LinkedIn or Crunchbase page is what the engines would recognise, add a fuller block in Settings → Code injection → Site header and accept that there will be two — engines merge them by @type more gracefully than a missing sameAs costs you.
3.Give the publication an about page with a real name on it
Assistants asked "who runs this newsletter" go looking for it, and answer from whatever they find. A Ghost site whose about page is a single line has handed that answer to whoever wrote about you elsewhere.
The readiness checks on Ghost
CueScout runs eight checks on whether an answer engine can read a site at all. These are the ones whose answer is different on Ghost — the rest are the same everywhere.
llms.txt present and parseable
Put llms.txt in your theme's /public directory. Ghost serves everything in there from the site root, so it lands at /llms.txt.
Organization schema with sameAs links
Ghost already emits Organization JSON-LD from your Publication settings, but sameAs only carries the Facebook and Twitter fields it has. Settings → Code injection → Site header is where to add a fuller block.
These describe Ghost’s own settings, which move without warning us. Last checked against the product on 2026-08-14.
What this does not do
- robots.txt and llms.txt live in the theme, so switching theme removes them. There is no place in Ghost admin to keep them safe from that.
- Ghost(Pro) does not give you filesystem access outside the theme upload, so both files have to travel in the theme zip.
- CueScout reads your public site over HTTP. It does not use the Ghost Admin or Content API and holds no key.
Frequently asked questions
Does Ghost already have structured data?
Yes — Organization on the site and Article on posts, generated from Publication settings. The gap is sameAs, which only carries the two social fields Ghost asks for.
Where does llms.txt go on a self-hosted Ghost?
Same place: the theme's /public directory. You could also serve it from nginx in front of Ghost, which survives theme changes and is the better option if you have the access.
Do newsletters get cited by AI engines?
Public archives do, when they answer a question somebody asked. Members-only posts do not — a crawler sees the paywall, and the content behind it may as well not exist for citation purposes.
Related
Site platforms
Every integration we publish Substack
Almost nothing here is yours to fix — and that changes what is worth doing instead.
Site platformsWordPress
The virtual robots.txt, the Yoast and Rank Math settings that produce sameAs, and where llms.txt goes.
Site platformsDocusaurus
static/ handles the files, headTags handles the schema, and pre-rendering handles the rest.
See where your Ghost site stands
The readiness check is free, needs no signup, and takes about half a minute. It works out what your site is built on and gives you the fixes written for it.