MDX in Git is the source of truth
Every article is a commit - diffable, reviewable, revertible. Publishing is a pull request. There is no database to run, migrate, or back up.
Open source · Agent-first publishing
Publishing built for agents, not editors.
Strand CMS is an open-source publishing system for programmatic blogs and news sites. Articles are MDX in Git, written and optimized by AI agents, with SEO and AI-search built into the core. No database. No CMS UI. No bloat.
Ghost gave humans a beautiful editor and a database. Strand CMS gives agents a strict schema, a Git repo, and a set of skills.
What it is
SEO + GEO baked into the core
Sitemaps, JSON-LD, RSS, robots, canonical tags - plus llms.txt and a clean .md of every page for AI search engines. Always on, never a plugin.
Agent-first by design
A set of skills, an MCP server, and an optional Hermes editor profile let agents research, write, optimize, and publish - against a schema that won't let a malformed post merge.
Full site or headless
Deploy the Next.js theme as-is, or consume the typed content API from your own React/Astro frontend. The crawlable surface stays static either way.
How it works
- 1
Scaffold
npm create strand@latestasks a few questions - frontend, analytics, agent mode, deploy target - and writes a ready-to-run repo with the content schema, CI validation, and your chosen adapters. - 2
Agents write
Skills and the MCP server give an agent the tools to draft MDX, optimize for SEO and AI-search, cite sources, and open a PR. A dedicated Hermes editor can run the whole publication.
- 3
Ship on merge
Merging regenerates the static site and every SEO/GEO artifact, then deploys to Vercel, Cloudflare, Netlify, or your own box - validation-gated.
Quickstart
One command to a running publication.
npm create strand@latestRequires Node 20+. Prefer to read first? The repository has the full design doc, the engine, the scaffolder, the MCP server, and the default theme.
This site runs on Strand CMS
The blog below is the engine, eating its own cooking.
These posts are MDX in this repo, rendered by the same loader and SEO/GEO generators the scaffolder ships. Proof is in the plumbing: /llms.txt, /sitemap.xml, and a clean .md of any post.
SEO is table stakes. GEO is the moat.
Generative Engine Optimization - being legible to ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews - is the new differentiator. Here is what it actually requires.
Why MDX-in-Git beats a database for agent content
When agents write your articles, Git is a better content store than a database: diffable history, pull-request review, instant rollback, and no infrastructure.
Introducing Strand CMS: publishing built for agents
Strand CMS is an open-source, agent-first publishing system. MDX in Git, SEO and AI-search built in, no database and no CMS UI. Here is the why and the how.