# Meta descriptions and SEO

Good docs earn search traffic. Clayo handles the technical side of SEO automatically, and gives you one lever worth pulling deliberately: the meta description.

## Meta descriptions

The meta description is the snippet shown under your page title in search results and link previews. Every article has one:

- **Authored**: you (or your agent) write it. Up to 300 characters; around 150 reads best in search results.
- **Derived**: if none is set, Clayo generates one from the article's opening content.

Derived descriptions are serviceable; authored ones are better, because they can lead with the reader's problem instead of your first sentence. A one-line request covers the whole project:

```
Write meta descriptions for every article that doesn't have one.
```

:::callout{type="tip"}
Write the description for the person searching, not the person already reading. "Fix failed webhook deliveries and replay missed events" beats "This article covers webhooks."
:::

## What Clayo does automatically

- **Sitemap**: your site serves `sitemap.xml` listing every published article with its last-modified date, so search engines find new content quickly.
- **Robots**: `robots.txt` allows crawling of everything published. Drafts are never crawlable; they are simply not on the site.
- **Titles**: each page's title tag is the article title plus your project name.
- **Fast pages**: docs pages are statically rendered and served from a CDN, which search engines reward.

## One canonical address

If your docs are reachable in more than one way, duplicate content could split your search ranking. Clayo prevents this by enforcing a single canonical base for every site, in this order of precedence:

1. A [subpath base URL](/articles/subpath-hosting) such as `yoursite.com/docs`
2. An active [custom domain](/articles/custom-domain)
3. Your `subdomain.clayo.site` address

All other addresses permanently redirect (HTTP 308) to the canonical one, so search engines only ever index a single copy of each page.

## Redirects protect your rankings

Changing an article's slug creates a permanent redirect from the old URL, and old slugs are preserved forever. Renames and reorganizations do not lose accumulated ranking. Details in [Links, slugs, and redirects](/articles/links-slugs-redirects).

## Search engines are not the only readers

AI assistants increasingly answer questions your customers would have typed into Google. Clayo publishes agent-readable versions of your docs automatically, including `llms.txt` and per-article markdown. See [llms.txt and agent-readable docs](/articles/llms-txt).