Search and SEO

Writing•3 min read||

DocsLit generates search indexes, sitemaps, and AI-readable files automatically. You do not need to configure anything — these features work out of the box when you run docslit build.

Built-in search

Every static build generates a search-index.json file that powers the client-side search bar. The index includes page titles, descriptions, group names, and full body text.

Readers press / or click the search icon to open the search dialog. Results update as they type, with matches ranked by relevance.

Add a description field to your frontmatter. It improves search relevance and appears in the llms.txt output for AI agents.

Search engine optimization

HTML pages

Static builds generate individual HTML pages at docs/{slug}.html for every page in your sidebar. These pages contain the fully rendered content, making them crawlable by search engines.

Sitemap

When you set the url field in docslit.json, the build generates a sitemap.xml:

{ "name": "My Docs", "url": "https://docs.example.com", "sidebar": [...] }

Submit this sitemap to Google Search Console and other search engines to improve indexing.

Robots.txt

The build generates a robots.txt file that allows all major search engines and AI crawlers by default.

AI agent discovery

DocsLit generates two files following the llmstxt.org specification:

A structured index of all your documentation pages with titles and descriptions. AI agents use this to understand your site structure and decide which pages to read. The complete text content of every page concatenated into a single file. AI agents can consume your entire documentation in one request.

These files are generated automatically from your page content and frontmatter descriptions.

Offline search

The offline build mode (docslit build --offline) embeds the search index directly into the HTML file. Search works without a server — even when opening the file from your desktop.

Best practices

Write a one-sentence description for every page. This improves search results, llms.txt quality, and helps readers decide if a page is relevant. Add "url" to your docslit.json to enable sitemap.xml generation with absolute URLs. Write headings that describe what the section covers. Headings are indexed for search and appear in the table of contents.

Next steps