Sharing and visibility

Visibility answers one question: who may reach this site? It is set per site, it takes effect the moment you save, and it is independent of whether the site is switched on at all.

The three levels

Public — reachable by anyone, and eligible to appear in search results.

Link-only — reachable by anyone holding the address, and kept out of every search engine. This is where new sites start.

Private — not served. Everyone gets a 404.

What a new site gets

A new site takes your account’s default visibility, not a fixed value. That default starts as link-only, and you can change it in Settings — including for sites your AI publishes on your behalf.

So “new sites are link-only” is only true until you change that setting. If you set your account default to public, every site you create afterwards is public and search-eligible from the moment it goes live. Existing sites keep whatever level they already have.

If you are unsure what yours is set to, look at Settings before publishing something you would rather not have indexed.

Public does not mean indexed

Choosing public makes a site eligible to be crawled. It does not put it in Google.

Search engines are additionally held off until your account has been approved once. A brand-new account can select public and still not be crawled — that isn’t a bug, and there is no setting to override it. After the first approval, public sites are crawlable normally.

There is also no way to make us submit your site to a search engine. Public simply stops us telling crawlers to stay away.

Private sites 404 for you too

This is the one that surprises everyone.

A private site returns 404 to its owner as well, at its own address, even while you are signed in. It is not a permissions check that recognises you and lets you through — the web server refuses the request before anything knows who is asking, which is exactly what makes “private” trustworthy.

To look at your own private site, use the preview on its dashboard page. That shows the site’s current release — the same files the public would get if the site weren’t private. It is not a staging copy and not a different version.

One private site is previewable at a time, per browser.