How to publish a valid llms.txt on Ghost

Verified 30 August 2026. Ghost has no setting for llms.txt and no folder you can drop a file into that lands on the site root. The fix takes about fifteen minutes: one route in routes.yaml, one Handlebars template, one upload. This guide covers both the Ghost(Pro) path and the self-hosted path, and it explains why the obvious way of checking your work reports success on a site that has no file at all.

Quick summary

Ghost's routing documentation says, verbatim, that routes render HTML unless you override it "by specifying a content_type property with a custom mime-type". That property is the whole trick. AIScan grades this file as C2, in the content dimension, and the pass bar comes from the llms.txt proposal: the file returns 200 and contains an H1, at least one ## section, and markdown links.

Why Ghost gives you nowhere to put the file

Ghost serves theme files under /assets/ and uploaded media under /content/images/. Neither is the site root, and Ghost admin has no file manager. So on Ghost the file cannot be a file. It has to be a route that renders text.

That makes Ghost the odd one out among the platforms documented here. Shopify generates llms.txt for you, Astro builds it as an endpoint, and Webflow stores an artifact you uploaded. Ghost renders it on request, from your posts, every time an agent asks.

Add the route

Ghost keeps its routing config at content/settings/routes.yaml. Add a template route with a plain-text content type:

routes:
  /llms.txt/:
    template: llms-txt
    content_type: text/plain

collections:
  /:
    permalink: /{slug}/
    template: index

taxonomies:
  tag: /tag/{slug}/
  author: /author/{slug}/

Keep the collections and taxonomies blocks. Uploading a routes file that omits them replaces your whole URL structure.

The trailing slash is not optional. According to the same routing page, "Trailing slashes are required" for dynamic routing, and in Ghost's own words, "Ghost automatically forces trailing slashes". Writing the route as /llms.txt/ is what makes it resolve.

Write the template

Create llms-txt.hbs in your theme root, alongside index.hbs. The {{#get}} helper queries the Content API server-side before the template renders:

# {{@site.title}}
> {{@site.description}}

## Posts
{{#get "posts" limit="all" order="published_at desc"}}{{#foreach posts}}- [{{title}}]({{url absolute="true"}}): {{excerpt words="20"}}
{{/foreach}}{{/get}}

## Start here
- [About]({{@site.url}}/about/): who publishes this

The {{#get}} helper reads posts, tags, authors, tiers and newsletters. Pages are not one of those resources, so list your important pages by hand in a second ## section, as above.

Zip the theme and upload it in Ghost admin. The uploader runs GScan on it automatically and, according to Ghost's theme docs, "any fatal errors will prevent the theme from being used", so a broken Handlebars block is caught before it reaches the site. Then upload routes.yaml under Settings > Labs. Editing the file directly on a self-hosted box works too, but Ghost has to be restarted; uploading through admin applies right away.

Self-hosted shortcut

If you run Ghost behind nginx or Caddy, you can skip the template and serve a static file at the bare path, which is the one thing routes.yaml cannot give you:

location = /llms.txt {
    alias /var/www/llms.txt;
    default_type text/plain;
}

The trade-off is honest: the proxy version never updates itself, while the template version regenerates from your posts on every request.

Read the response, not the status code

Here is the part that catches people. Verified on 30 August 2026, we requested /llms.txt from two Ghost publications that do not publish one, Platformer and 404 Media. Both returned 302 to the homepage, which then returned 200 with text/html. A follow-redirects status check therefore reports 200 on a Ghost site with no llms.txt at all.

So check the destination, not the code:

curl -sIL https://example.com/llms.txt | grep -iE '^(HTTP|location|content-type)'

You want the chain to end on your own /llms.txt/ with content-type: text/plain. If the final location is your homepage, the route is not live.

When the scan still reports C2 missing

Branch on what the response actually showed you:

Where AIScan fits, and where it doesn't

Run the scan first. It fetches the file the way an agent would and tells you which row to read:

npx aiscan-cli yoursite.com

Row C2 is this file. AIScan also runs C1, C3 and E3 on the same fetch, which matters because a Ghost site that passes C2 can still fail E3 if its theme renders posts client-side. The llms.txt generator will produce a starting file if you would rather paste one than write the Handlebars.

On that last question, the review of the evidence fetched from real crawler logs is more useful than any scan.

Ship it, then scan it

1. Add the route, upload the theme, upload routes.yaml.
2. Run npx aiscan-cli yoursite.com and read row C2.
3. Confirm the redirect chain ends on text/plain.
4. Re-run the scan after your next theme change, because a theme upload replaces llms-txt.hbs.

The rest of the checks in this dimension are documented at /docs/checks/content, and every platform guide published so far is indexed at aiscan.site/guides.