SEO and site maintenance | Paragraph Docs
SEO and site maintenance
How your site stays fast, findable, and healthy, with daily upkeep from your agent.
Being found is half of being read. Your Paragraph site ships with solid technical SEO out of the box, and your agent maintains it every day, so your writing keeps showing up in search engines and AI tools without you thinking about it.
What's built in
Every Paragraph site ships with:
- Clean structure. Fast pages that search engines can crawl and understand.
- Sitemaps. Every post is listed, so crawlers find new work quickly.
- Structured data. Machine-readable metadata that helps search engines present your posts well.
- llms.txt. A guide for AI tools, so assistants like ChatGPT can find and cite your work accurately.
None of this needs configuration. It's part of publishing on Paragraph.
What you control
The publish settings for each post are where your input matters most:
- Title and description. These become your search snippet and social preview. Clear beats clever.
- Post URL. Paragraph suggests a slug from your title. Keep it short and descriptive.
Ask your agent for help here. It's good at writing descriptions that summarize a post honestly, and it can suggest better titles when you're stuck.
If you're on a custom domain, the search value you build accrues to a domain you own.
Your agent's daily patrol
Sites decay quietly: links rot, pages bloat, old posts slip in rankings. Your agent patrols your site every day and does the maintenance work most writers never get to:
- Repairs broken links and redirect chains before readers or crawlers hit them.
- Trims slow, oversized pages so everything stays fast.
- Writes missing titles and descriptions where posts lack them.
- Refreshes posts that are quietly losing traffic, updating them so they keep earning readers.
- Measures every fix against traffic, so you can see whether the work paid off.
You don't need to schedule any of this. It's part of what your agent does for your publication.
What happens automatically, and what waits for you
The line is simple: routine upkeep happens on its own, and anything readers would notice waits for your approval.
| Happens automatically | Waits for your approval |
|---|---|
| Link and redirect repairs | Rewrites to a post's content |
| Page performance trims | Visible changes to your site |
| Filling in missing metadata | Anything a reader would see as new |
Pending changes show up for review, and nothing visible ships without your sign-off.
See the results
The Search & AI tab in Analytics shows how discovery is going: visits from search engines, visits from AI assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity, and which posts are being found. It's the scoreboard for all of the above.
You can also just ask in chat: "How's my search traffic trending?" or "Which posts are losing readers?"
Next steps
Analytics
Track search, AI, web, and newsletter performance.
Approvals
How your agent asks before making visible changes.
Custom domains
Point your own domain at your publication instead of its paragraph.com address.
Subscribers
Manage your subscriber list, import it from anywhere, and export it whenever you like.