Lanlan.docs

SEO and getting found

What Lanlan does automatically for search engines, what you control, and how to submit your site to Google and Bing.

What's automatic

Every time your site deploys, Lanlan updates a handful of files that search engines read:

  • Sitemap.xml — a list of every page on your site. Search engines use it to discover new pages and decide what to crawl. Draft pages and password-protected pages are excluded automatically.
  • Robots.txt — tells search engines which pages they're allowed to look at. Updates to match your draft and password settings.
  • llms.txt + llms-full.txt — a relatively new convention some AI crawlers use. Off by default; turn on for a site by asking Claude "enable llms.txt for this site."
  • Open Graph fallbacks — if you didn't set per-page social-share titles or descriptions, Lanlan fills them in from the page's own title and meta description so Slack/WhatsApp/social previews aren't blank.

None of this is plan-gated — every site, free or paid, gets the full set.

What you control

The per-page SEO basics are managed in your dashboard's pages list. For each page you can edit:

  • Title — the headline in Google's search results and in the browser tab.
  • Meta description — the snippet of text underneath the title in search results.
  • Open Graph title and description — what shows up when someone shares the page on social or Slack.
  • Open Graph image — the preview image for social shares. Upload your own; Lanlan doesn't auto-generate one.

Or in Claude:

  • "Update the home page so it ranks for 'florist san francisco' — rewrite the title and description."
  • "Set the social share image for the about page to the photo I'm about to send."

At deploy time, if you didn't set Open Graph fields explicitly, Lanlan reuses your title and meta description so the page still has reasonable preview cards. The Open Graph image stays empty unless you set one.

Submit your site to Google and Bing

Google and Bing find most sites on their own eventually, but submitting the sitemap directly speeds it up by days or weeks.

Open your dashboard's Get found page. It walks you through:

  • Google Search Console — verify your domain, submit your sitemap, and start tracking what people search to find you.
  • Bing Webmaster Tools — same thing for Bing (and the AI search results that pull from it).
  • Custom domain — if you haven't connected one yet, the page nudges you to. Sites on a custom domain get indexed faster and rank better than your-site.lanlan.site URLs.

The page tracks which steps you've done so you don't have to remember.

Hide a page from search engines

Two options:

  • Make the page a draft. It stays accessible via a preview link, but it's removed from your sitemap and the robots.txt tells search engines not to crawl it. See Manage your pages.
  • Add a password. Same effect on search engines (excluded from sitemap, listed in robots.txt as off-limits) plus the page itself requires a password to read.

If you want to hide your whole site from search engines (a staging build, a private project), ask Claude: "hide my whole site from search engines." Lanlan flips a site-wide flag that puts every page off-limits in robots.txt until you turn it back on.

A note on rankings

The technical SEO basics — sitemap, robots, structured page metadata, fast-loading pages, automatic responsive images — are taken care of. But ranking well for the searches you want is mostly about what's on the page: clear titles, useful content that matches what people are searching for, and time. Lanlan can't shortcut that part.

What to try next

If you get stuck

Ask Claude. "I can't figure out how to…" almost always gets you unstuck. For anything Claude can't help with, email support.