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Once you’ve finished writing, editing, or importing your content, you can publish your work to the web as a docs site. Your docs will be published on the web and available to your selected audience. The content on your site comes from spaces in your organization. When you create a new docs site, you can create a new space, or link an existing one.

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Create a docs site

To create a docs site, click the plus + icon next to Docs site in the sidebar to launch the docs site wizard. Give your site a name, choose a starting point for your content, and select whether you want to publish your site now or later. If you already have content in a space that you would like to use, you can create a docs site directly from that space by opening the space and clicking Share in the top-right corner of the window. Then choose Publish as a docs site from the share modal.

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Publishing options

By default, your site will be published publicly. You can change your site’s visibility in your site’s settings. There are three primary options to choose from when publishing your site:

Public

Publish your docs publicly to the web

Share links

Publish your docs with private share links

Authenticated access

Protect your published docs behind an OAuth sign in

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Public publishing

If you created your docs for a public audience, you can publish it on the web. Spaces that you publish on the web can be indexed by search engines and will be available to anyone.
1

Publish as public

To publish your docs publicly on the web, head to the docs site you want to publish, click the Publish button, and choose the Public option.
2

Configure search indexing (optional)

By default, your site will be indexed by search engines. You can disable this — meaning the docs are still available to everyone on the web, but they won’t be indexed by search engines such as Google.
Docs sites that aren’t indexed can be particularly helpful if you want to publish a beta version of your docs, or do large-scale user testing without impacting your SEO with potentially duplicate content.

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Page-level search indexing controls

You can also control search indexing at the individual page level. GitBook provides two types of search indexing controls: Internal search indexing Controls whether pages are indexed in GitBook’s internal search engine and Ask AI feature. This affects:
  • Content search within your GitBook space
  • Ask AI’s ability to reference the page content
External search indexing (Web crawlers) Controls whether search engines and web crawlers (Google, ChatGPT, etc.) can index your pages. This affects:
  • SEO and discoverability through search engines
  • Web crawler access to your content
Hierarchical inheritance behavior: When you disable search indexing on a parent page, it automatically disables indexing for ALL sub-pages beneath it. Sub-pages cannot re-enable search indexing if their parent page has it disabled.
This feature is available on Premium and Ultimate site plans.
You can share your content privately with customers or partners without needing to invite them to your organization by using share links.
1

Configure share links

To publish your docs privately, head to the docs site’s settings, click Audience settings button, and choose the Share links option.
2

Create a link

Click on Create link to create a share link. You can review and name your share links, customize your domain and copy the link.
3

Share the link

Once the link is active, a private token is generated within your URL. Sharing this link will give non-GitBook users access to your content in read mode only.
You can generate as many links as you need from Audience settings. The content will be accessible to anyone following the link, and you can revoke and regenerate share links at any time.

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Delete or unpublish a docs site

To delete a docs site, you’ll need to open your site’s dashboard, then open Site settings from the top-right corner.

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Site editing permissions

Docs sites inherit the editing permissions from the spaces linked to them. You can view all the permissions set for users with access to the docs site from the permissions modal from the docs site’s Overview page. You’ll also see which space the user’s permission was inherited from.
  • Users with Administrator or Creator permissions on any space linked to a specific docs site will have full access permissions for the site
  • Users with Reviewer, Editor, Commenter, or Reader permissions on any space linked to a specific site will get read-only permissions

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