Publish & SEO
Everything you write in DocStar starts as an internal draft. Publishing is how you choose what leaves your workspace and becomes a public docs site that customers, search engines and AI assistants can read.
Draft vs published
Every page and endpoint has a publish state. The status dot in the bulk publish list uses the same colors.
| State | What it means | Who can see it |
|---|---|---|
| Unpublished (red) | The page has never been published, or you unpublished it. | Only workspace members who can open the collection. |
| Updated (amber) | The page is live, but it has been edited since it was last published. | Readers still see the last published version. Your team sees the new draft. |
| Published (green) | The live version matches the latest content. | Anyone who can reach the docs site. |
Editing a published page never changes the live site by itself. The page goes back to draft, and readers keep seeing the old version until you publish again.
Internal vs public
- Internal: a collection that is not published stays inside your workspace. Your team reads and edits it in the DocStar app, and nothing is reachable from outside.
- Public: once you publish the collection, its published pages are served as a docs site. You get a DocStar link, and you can connect your own domain.
A page is visible to readers only when both the page and its collection are published. Publishing a page inside an unpublished collection keeps it private.
What readers see
Readers see only the published version of each published page. On the site they get:
- Your branding: logo, colors, fonts, header and footer. See Branding & Domain.
- A landing page with search, a sidebar and a table of contents.
- The page in other languages, if you turned on Multiple Languages.
Drafts, comments, version history and unpublished pages are never shown.
In this section
- Publish Pages: publish a page, a whole collection, or many pages at once, and unpublish.
- Redirects: keep old links working after you rename or move pages.
- SEO, Sitemap and llms.txt: meta tags, AI SEO help, and files for search engines and AI crawlers.
- Access Control: put a password on a published collection.
- Multiple Languages: publish AI translations of your docs.