Guide
Write meta descriptions for your whole blog at once
If you have more than a handful of posts, some of them are missing a good meta description — almost everyone’s archive is. They are tedious to write, easy to skip when you are publishing, and impossible to fix in bulk from the Ghost editor, which makes you open each post one at a time. So they sit empty, and search engines fall back to whatever scrap of your intro they can find. This is a textbook job for an AI recipe across the whole archive.
How Ghost handles excerpts and meta descriptions
A quick clarification, because the fields overlap. In Ghost, each post has a custom excerpt, and it has a separate meta description field in the post’s SEO settings. When you have not set a dedicated meta description, Ghost generally uses the excerpt as the meta description for search and social. Specter syncs the excerpt field — it travels with each post’s metadata — so the practical, high-leverage move is to make sure every post has a strong, deliberate excerpt rather than an empty one or an auto-clipped sentence.
The bulk pass, in the browser
Specter connects to your Ghost blog in the browser and brings every post into one workspace, excerpt field and all — nothing to install. Connect via the first-sync guide if you haven’t, then run a recipe. Specter isn’t an AI itself; it’s the workflow layer that runs the model across your whole site and shows you every change before it ships. The instruction is simple:
For every post, look at its excerpt. Where it’s missing or empty, write a meta description of about 150 characters that summarizes what the post actually delivers and includes its main topic. Leave posts that already have a deliberate excerpt alone, and don’t touch the body.
Telling it to leave existing excerpts alone matters — you’re filling gaps, not overwriting the ones you wrote by hand. You can run a tighter version that also rewrites weak, generic excerpts, but do that as a separate, clearly-scoped recipe so you can review it on its own. Browsing your archive is free; only the AI run spends credits, and your workspace opens with 500 free — enough to see exactly what this does across your blog.
Review the diff, then publish
Because meta descriptions are small and numerous, skimming the diff is quick and worth doing — an AI will occasionally write something bland or slightly off, and these are the lines that show up in search results, so they earn a glance. Reviewing the changes is free: read each one, fix any duds, and Specter shows you exactly which posts would update on Ghost before anything goes live. Every publish keeps a snapshot behind it, so a description you change your mind about is one revert away.
This pairs naturally with the broader bulk SEO edit workflow — titles and metadata across the archive — and with refreshing old posts at scale, where updated content deserves an updated description anyway. One recipe, the whole blog, descriptions that you actually chose. Subscribe now →
Prefer to run this locally, with your posts as .md files on disk and your own AI in the loop? The desktop and open-source edition does the same job on your Mac.