I’ve Installed Blacklight — Now What?
You’ve installed Blacklight. The dashboard is open. Everything looks a bit empty.
Don’t panic. That’s normal.
Blacklight isn’t like other SEO plugins that fill your screen with numbers the moment you activate them. Most of those numbers are made up anyway. Blacklight needs to actually look at your site before it can tell you anything useful — which, when you think about it, is how it should work.
So here’s what to do first.
Step 1 — Run your first scan
Head to Lightcrawl in the Blacklight menu and start a crawl.
This is Blacklight doing its job. It maps your pages, follows your links, checks your headings, looks for thin content, broken URLs, redirect chains — the full picture. Depending on the size of your site this might take a few minutes, so don’t click away thinking nothing is happening.
Once it’s done, Blacklight knows your site. That’s when things get interesting.
Step 2 — Check your recommendations
After the crawl, head to the Recommendations page. This is where Blacklight tells you what it found — in plain English, not a score out of 100 and a vague warning icon.
You’ll see things like:
- Pages with missing or duplicate title tags
- Internal links pointing nowhere
- Pages so thin Google probably ignores them
- Redirect chains slowing your site down
Each issue comes with a fix. That’s the whole point.
One thing Blacklight does not do
It won’t fix anything automatically.
No silent rewrites. No “AI optimisation” running in the background changing your content without asking. Blacklight finds the problems and tells you exactly what to do — but you’re the one holding the spanner.
That’s intentional. Your site is yours.
Step 3 — Work through it
Pick the highest priority issues from the recommendations list and start working through them. You don’t need to fix everything at once. Even knocking out the top five issues from your first scan will move the needle.
Run another crawl when you’re done and watch the numbers change.
Step 4 — Make your site understandable by AI
Herald handles AI crawler discovery for your site. Once enabled it generates a /llms.txt file at your site’s root that AI systems can read to understand what your site is about.
There is nothing you need to do to keep it running — Herald regenerates the file automatically every day and whenever you publish new content. The one thing worth doing is visiting Herald in your Blacklight menu and filling in the Site Context fields: your site name, a clear description of what it does, and the primary topics it covers. The more context you give it, the more useful the file becomes for AI systems trying to understand your site.
Once that’s done Herald is set and forget.
That’s the Blacklight loop
Install → Scan → Recommendations → Fix → Repeat.
It’s not complicated. SEO rarely is once someone stops hiding the actual work behind a dashboard full of noise.
If you want to understand what each module does in more detail, start with the Lightcrawl deep dive — or go back and read What is Blacklight SEO? for the full picture.
Find out what happened to me on the 2nd day of using my own tools whilst improving, adding and tweaking at the same time in this short post I made.