SEO & AI Visibility

Files: src/config/config.toml, page frontmatter · Skill level: Beginner

Ecozen does the technical SEO for you: titles, descriptions, canonical links, a sitemap, robots.txt, structured data for a local business, social preview tags, an RSS feed, and optional files for AI tools. Your job is to set your address, describe your business, and write good titles and descriptions.

First, Set Your Address

[site]
  baseUrl = "https://www.your-domain.com"   # ships as "https://example.com"

Canonical links, the sitemap, the sitemap line in robots.txt, the RSS feed, structured data, social previews, and the AI files all use it. The theme ships with the placeholder https://example.com, and npm run build prints a yellow [site] warning when the Astro build finishes until you change it. Don’t deploy while you see that warning: every page would point search engines at example.com.

A SITE_URL environment variable on the build takes priority over baseUrl, for example SITE_URL=https://www.your-domain.com npm run build, or a variable in your host’s settings. On Vercel, the included vercel.sh sets it for you: production builds keep a SITE_URL you set in the Vercel project, or use your Vercel production domain, and preview builds use https://staging.<production domain>.

Titles And Descriptions

Every page and entry accepts these frontmatter fields:

---
title: "Solar packages with a fixed price"   # shown on the page
metaTitle: "Pricing"                          # search result title (optional)
description: "..."                            # page summary
metaDescription: "Compare solar packages..."  # search result description, 140–160 characters (optional)
image: "/images/photos/my-photo.jpg"          # social preview image (optional)
canonical: ""                                 # only if the page is a copy of another URL
robots: ""                                    # for example "noindex, nofollow"
keywords: ["solar installer", "battery storage"]
---

Titles get your tagline added (“Pricing - Your tagline”); disableTagline: true turns it off for a page. Site-wide defaults are in [site] and [seo].

Sitemap And Robots

/sitemap-index.xml lists every page. Leave pages out with excludeFromSitemap: true, or whole folders with [seo.sitemap] exclude. Draft pages are removed automatically.
/robots.txt is built from [seo.robotsTxt] by src/pages/robots.txt.ts. Add paths crawlers must skip to disallow.

Structured Data For Your Business

Ecozen adds structured data (JSON-LD) that describes your business and pages to search engines: your business and website on every page, a Service on each service page, BlogPosting on posts, JobPosting on job pages, and a WebPage everywhere else. It is built from your content and one table in config.toml:

[seo.localBusiness]
  type         = "HomeAndConstructionBusiness"   # or "LocalBusiness", "Electrician", "RoofingContractor"
  areaServed   = ["Springfield", "Riverside", "Greenfield"]   # placeholder: your towns or regions
  priceRange   = "$$"
  openingHours = ["Mo-Fr 08:00-18:00", "Sa 09:00-13:00"]

The business name is site.title, and the address, phone, and email come from [settings.contactInfo]. Replace the sample towns and hours. After launch, check a page with Google’s Rich Results Test.

Keep the data true: the job posting data is for real openings only, so replace or delete the sample roles before launch.

[opengraph]
  image = "/images/og-image.jpg"   # fallback image, public/images/og-image.jpg

A page with its own image uses it, cropped to 1200×630. Every other page uses the fallback image, which ships with the demo’s branding: replace it with your own 1200×630 image.

RSS Feed

/rss.xml lists your blog posts, one feed per language (/fr/rss.xml).

AI Search And AI Assistants

Google says no special files or markup are needed to appear in its AI features (AI Overviews and AI Mode): a page that is indexed and can show a snippet in Search is eligible. The settings below control which AI crawlers may visit, and add optional files and links for AI tools.

1. Choose which AI crawlers may visit

[seo.robotsTxt]
  aiSearch   = true    # AI answer engines that cite pages (ChatGPT search, Claude, Perplexity, ...)
  aiTraining = true    # crawlers that collect content to train AI models

Each switch writes robots.txt rules for a list of crawlers, in src/lib/utils/aiCrawlers.ts:

aiSearch = false asks the crawlers of AI answer engines (ChatGPT search, Claude, Perplexity, DuckDuckGo AI answers) not to fetch your pages, which can keep your business out of their answers.
aiTraining = false asks the training crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended, CCBot, and meta-externalagent) to stay away. Google also uses Google-Extended for grounding in Gemini apps, so this can reduce how often your pages appear in Gemini answers.

Both switches also set the Content-Signal line under User-agent: *. Neither affects Google Search or AI Overviews, which use the normal Googlebot and follow your regular search rules.

2. llms.txt and Markdown copies

[seo.ai]
  llmsTxt       = true   # /llms.txt (an index of the site) and /llms-full.txt (all page text)
  markdownPages = true   # a Markdown copy of services, projects, posts, open roles, FAQ, pricing, and legal pages

/llms.txt follows a proposed convention: a Markdown map of your site that some AI tools and coding agents can read. /llms-full.txt holds the text of every page. Search engines don’t document using these files, so treat them as a convenience for tools that look for them, not as an SEO setting. Each language gets its own (/fr/llms.txt). With markdownPages, a service at /services/residential-solar/ is also available as /services/residential-solar.md. Leave a page out of all of these with excludeFromAi: true; pages marked noindex are left out automatically.

llms.txt starts with a short summary of the business, ai.siteSummary in src/i18n/en.json (and the file for each other language), followed by your contact details. The shipped summary describes a generic solar installer: rewrite it for your business.

3. The Copy page and Ask AI links

[settings.pageActions]
  enable    = true
  footer    = true   # the Ask AI and llms row in every footer layout
  providers = ["chatgpt", "claude", "perplexity", "grok"]   # [] hides the "Ask" links

Blog posts and service, project, and job pages get a Copy page button, a View as Markdown link, and Ask ChatGPT / Claude / Perplexity / Grok links that open the page in that assistant. Every footer also has a row with the same assistants and links to the Markdown copy, llms.txt, and llms-full.txt. See AI Links & llms.

Do It With AI

Improve SEO for my business. For every content file with a title (src/content/**/english/), write a
metaDescription of 140–160 characters based on the page content, and a metaTitle under 60
characters where the title is vague. Don't change other fields. Then do the same in the other languages.
Set [seo.localBusiness] areaServed to [TOWNS] and openingHours to [HOURS] in
src/config/config.toml, rewrite ai.siteSummary in every file in src/i18n/ for my business,
and check that [site] baseUrl is "[MY URL]".

SEO & AI Visibility