Overview of SEO & GEO
Overview of SEO & GEO
Fern optimizes your documentation for both traditional search engines and AI-powered tools out of the box. SEO ensures your pages rank well in Google, Bing, and other search engines, while GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) ensures AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Cursor can efficiently consume and reference your content.
What Fern handles automatically
Without any configuration, Fern generates meta tags, social previews, canonical URLs, clean slugs, and AI-optimized content via llms.txt for every page.
Fern also generates a sitemap.xml for your documentation site that follows Google’s sitemap best practices. Each page entry includes a <lastmod> timestamp that updates only when the page’s content actually changes. Trivial formatting differences like whitespace or capitalization are ignored. These timestamps are invisible to readers and used exclusively by search engines to prioritize crawling recently updated pages.
Sitemap timestamps are separate from the last-updated frontmatter field, which displays a visible date in the page footer for readers.
A default robots.txt is served at the root of your site that allows all crawlers and points to your sitemap.xml. To opt in or out of specific AI crawlers, gate sensitive sections, or signal training and search preferences with the Cloudflare Content Signals Policy, serve a custom robots.txt instead.
Customize your SEO
When you want more control, you can configure:
Configure titles, descriptions, and social previews for search engines
Customize URL paths for clean, meaningful page addresses
Set up redirects to preserve SEO equity when pages move
Serve a custom robots.txt to control how search engines and AI crawlers access your content
