Clean up your Ghost tags across the whole blog

Tags drift. Over a few years and a few authors, you end up with “AI” and “artificial-intelligence” and “a.i.” all in use, near-duplicates that fragment your topic pages, one-off tags that tag nothing else, and inconsistent capitalization. The Ghost admin lets you rename or merge tags one at a time, which is fine for a small fix and miserable for a real cleanup. When the job is normalizing taxonomy across the whole archive, you want to see and edit all the tags at once — which means working on your posts as files.

Tags live in the frontmatter

This is squarely in Specter’s wheelhouse, because tags are one of the fields it syncs. Specter pulls each post down as markdown with its tags listed in the frontmatter, edits flow both ways, and pushing the file back updates the post’s tags on Ghost. So a taxonomy cleanup becomes ordinary text editing across a folder, with the full picture in front of you instead of buried one post at a time.

Two ways to do the cleanup

For a known set of fixes — you already know “a.i.” and “artificial-intelligence” should both become “AI” — a plain find-and-replace across the frontmatter does it, no AI required. Open the folder in your editor and replace across all files.

For the messier job of figuring out what the taxonomy should be, hand the folder to an AI assistant. The useful first step is a survey, not an edit:

Read the "tags" frontmatter across every .md file in this folder.
List all distinct tags with how many posts use each, and group ones
that are obvious duplicates or near-synonyms. Don't change anything
yet — just propose a normalized tag list and the merges to get there.

Review that proposed mapping — this is where your judgment about your own topics matters — then have it apply the merges you approve:

Apply this tag mapping to the "tags" frontmatter of every post:
[your approved mapping]. Only change the tags field. Leave each
post's body, title, and other frontmatter untouched.

Preview before it touches Ghost

Tag changes ripple into your topic pages and navigation, so review the diff, then lean on Specter’s dry-run preview to confirm exactly which posts would update before anything goes live. Snapshot the folder with git first so a mapping you misjudged is one git checkout away from undone.

The same file-based approach powers the rest of the bulk jobs here — SEO edits, meta descriptions, and internal links. Tags are just another field, and once your blog is a folder, fixing them everywhere at once stops being a chore you avoid.