Hidden pages

Some pages don't belong in the public sidebar: drafts, internal handbooks, deprecated guides you still need to link to. Hidden pages stay reachable by direct URL but disappear from navigation, search, your sitemap, and the AI context fed to LLMs.

Hide a single page

Add hidden: true to the page's frontmatter:

---
title: Internal handbook
hidden: true
---

The page still renders at its URL. Jamdesk:

Drops it from the sidebar
Adds <meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow"> so search engines skip it
Excludes it from sitemap.xml, llms.txt, llms-full.txt, and on-site search

Hide a whole group or tab

Set "hidden": true on a group or tab in docs.json:

{
  "navigation": {
    "tabs": [
      {
        "tab": "Public",
        "groups": [{ "group": "Guides", "pages": ["intro", "quickstart"] }]
      },
      {
        "tab": "Internal",
        "hidden": true,
        "groups": [{ "group": "Runbooks", "pages": ["oncall", "postmortems"] }]
      }
    ]
  }
}

Every page under the hidden node inherits the rule. The same flag works on tabs, groups, anchors, dropdowns, products, languages, and versions.

Keep hidden pages in search

Add "searchable": true to keep a hidden tab or group indexed for site search, AI answers, and the sitemap:

{
  "tab": "Internal",
  "hidden": true,
  "searchable": true,
  "groups": [{ "group": "Runbooks", "pages": ["oncall"] }]
}

Frontmatter hidden: true on a child page still wins. searchable only re-opens descendants that haven't opted out themselves.

Keep a page out of search only

Add search: false to the frontmatter of a page that should stay in the sidebar and stay indexable, but not turn up in site search or AI answers:

---
title: Legacy v1 endpoints
search: false
---

The page keeps its place in navigation, your sitemap, llms.txt, and your RSS feed. Search engines still index it. It leaves the lookup surfaces: on-site search, AI chat answers, and the MCP server.

search: false is the opposite job from hidden: true. hidden takes a page out of navigation and the indexing surfaces. search: false leaves all of that alone and only stops the page being retrieved. Don't confuse it with the navigation-level searchable, which opts hidden pages back into search.

How much of a page gets indexed

Search doesn't index a page as one blob. It indexes it section by section. Each heading becomes its own search entry. A search for "Rate limits" lands on that heading rather than the top of a long page.

Two limits apply automatically:

Limit	Value	What happens past it
Entries per page	50	Sections are indexed in page order. Sections after the 50th are left out of search.
Text per section	First 300 characters	Wording deeper into a section isn't matched.

The page itself takes one of the 50 slots, so 49 sections are indexed.

The cap exists because search weighs every entry against the rest of your index. One page emitting hundreds of entries crowds the others out of results. A generated changelog can fill half an index and push relevant pages off the first screen.

A page over the cap still renders in full. Only its later sections stop being findable, and nothing on the page tells your readers that.

Split a page with more than ~50 headings into several pages. That also improves navigation. For a machine-generated page that nobody searches by hand, add search: false instead to keep the whole page out of the index.

Put a term where search weighs it most: the page title (weighted highest), then a heading, then the description. Body text is weighted lowest. Only its first 300 characters per section count.

seo.metatags.keywords does not feed site search. It emits an HTML <meta name="keywords"> tag. Google has stated it ignores that tag for ranking. You can't attach extra search terms to a page. Put the words you want matched in the title, a heading, or the description.

Project-wide controls

These flags live under seo in docs.json:

Flag	Default	Effect
`seo.indexing`	`"navigable"`	Only pages listed in your navigation appear in artifacts. Set to `"all"` to include every MDX file in your repo.
`seo.indexHiddenPages`	`false`	Set to `true` to include `hidden: true` pages in sitemap, llms.txt, and search, and drop the auto-noindex tag.

Example:

{
  "seo": {
    "indexing": "all"
  }
}

Quick reference

Scenario	Frontmatter	docs.json	Visible in sidebar	Direct URL	In sitemap
Normal page	-	listed	Yes	Yes	Yes
Hidden via frontmatter	`hidden: true`	listed	No	Yes	No
Page not in nav (orphan)	-	omitted	No	Yes	No
Hidden group	-	`hidden: true` on group	No	Yes	No
Hidden + searchable group	-	`hidden: true, searchable: true`	No	Yes	Yes
Out of search only	`search: false`	listed	Yes	Yes	Yes
Project opts into indexing all	-	any	Same as above	Yes	Yes

When to use each

Drafts and previews: frontmatter hidden: true on individual pages
Internal sections for a small team: a hidden group or tab
Compliance docs that should be public but not promoted: hidden group with searchable: true
Full-repo indexing for AI grounding only: seo.indexing: "all"
Superseded pages you still want linkable and indexed but not surfaced by search or AI: frontmatter search: false

Hidden pages aren't access control. Anyone who has the URL can read them. For access control, see Password Protection.