Include Full Search as a Default

The rule

Every Astro Knots site ships full-text search from its first build. Search is standard equipment, not a milestone. A four-page splash gets it for the same reason a 700-page one does: the cost is a dependency and one line of config, and retrofitting it later means going back through every template to add content markers.

Why Pagefind specifically

No service, no index server, no API key. Pagefind builds a static index at build time and queries it client-side from the published output. A GitHub-Pages splash can have real search with nothing behind it.
It indexes the built HTML, not the source. So it searches whatever actually rendered — including content pulled in from roll-ups and generated collections, which a source-scanning indexer would miss.
It scales to the sizes we actually have. Verified 2026-08-17: 712 pages on ai-labs/splash, 287 on augment-it/splash, 7 on flave-ai/splash. Same config at both ends.

The recipe

All seven adopting surfaces use the astro-pagefind integration, not the Pagefind CLI. Match this — do not add && pagefind --site dist to the build script.

// astro.config.mjs
import pagefind from 'astro-pagefind';

export default defineConfig({
  integrations: [
    // astro-pagefind runs Pagefind against `dist/` after `astro build` and copies
    // pagefind/* into the published output. Search runs entirely client-side.
    pagefind(),
  ],
});

// package.json — note the build script stays plain
"build": "astro build",
"devDependencies": { "pagefind": "^1.5.2" }

Mark the content

The integration indexes nothing useful until templates say what to index. Four attributes, all in active use:

Attribute	Purpose
`data-pagefind-body`	the indexable region of a page — without this, the page is not indexed at all
`data-pagefind-filter`	a facet, e.g. `kind:Context`, `type:blueprints`, `tag:Astro`
`data-pagefind-meta`	metadata surfaced in a result, e.g. `title:…`
`data-pagefind-ignore`	exclude nav, chrome, footers — the most-used of the four, because unmarked chrome pollutes every single result

Typical entry-page shape:

<main data-pagefind-body data-pagefind-meta={`title:${entry.data.title}`}>
  <span data-pagefind-filter="kind:Context" hidden></span>
  {entry.data.tags?.map((t) => <span data-pagefind-filter={`tag:${t}`} hidden></span>)}

Current adoption — the spec is only partly kept

Has it (7): ai-labs/splash · ai-labs/augment-it/splash · ai-labs/memopop-ai/apps/memopop-site · lfm/splash · ai-labs/id-didi-sh/splash · ai-labs/flave-ai/splash · ai-labs/context-vigilance-kit/splash

Missing it (15) — no integration, no CLI, no data-pagefind-* markers anywhere:

astro-knots/splash — 218 pages, the largest gap
content-farm/splash — 143 pages
site
astro-knots/sites/: fullstack-vc, mpstaton-site, lossless-changelog, arthouse-site, dark-matter, learnstart-site, twf_site, banner-site, cilantro-site, coglet-shuffle, cogs-site, hypernova-site

The pattern is stark: adoption tracks ai-labs, not astro-knots — which is backwards, given this spec lives in astro-knots. astro-knots/splash and content-farm/splash are the two highest-value fixes.

Gotchas

prerender = false pages are not indexed. Pagefind reads dist/; an SSR route emits no HTML at build time. mpstaton-site produces zero static HTML files, so Pagefind would index nothing there as currently configured. An SSR site needs a different approach — this is the one place the default does not simply apply.
The search widget mints a random DOM id per build (search-iba5uok, etc.), injected into the header of every page. Harmless at runtime, but it makes builds non-deterministic: two consecutive builds of untouched source differ on 100% of pages. Normalize search-[a-z0-9]{5,} before diffing build output, or a before/after comparison proves nothing. See [[Rule-to-Assure-Collection-Schema-is-Flexible]], which depends on such diffs.
Forgetting data-pagefind-body fails silently — the build succeeds, Pagefind reports a lower page count, and nobody notices. Check the reported count against the built page count.

Remaining work

Add the integration to astro-knots/splash and content-farm/splash.
Decide the SSR story for mpstaton-site.
Roll through astro-knots/sites/*.
Consider promoting the config + marked-up layout into the shared splash scaffold so new sites inherit it rather than copying it.

The maintain-splash-pages skill — the splash scaffold this should be folded into
[[Rule-to-Assure-Collection-Schema-is-Flexible]] — the build-diff caveat above