About Ghost Explore.

Welcome to Ghost Explore, the home of the Ghost creator network. We created Explore as a way for creators and readers alike to discover their favourite new publications. There's something here for everyone.

Anyone running a website using Ghost can add themselves to Explore to be featured prominently on Ghost.org, and throughout the wider Ghost ecosystem.

To make sure it's a good experience for everyone, here are a few guidelines, details, and frequently asked questions about how Ghost Explore works:

How to add your site

You can submit any website running on Ghost (at least version 5.8 or higher) to ghost.org/explore/ by clicking on the Add your site link in the main navigation.

Adding your site will ask you to grant permission for Ghost Explore to create a read-only API connection to your website and collect data used to populate a listing in the directory. After that, you will be able to choose exactly what data is shared publicly on Ghost Explore.

Sites that choose to share more data (like number of members and/or revenue) are featured more prominently, at the top of the Ghost Explore directory.

If your site contains NSFW content, you can submit it to Ghost Explore, but you must check the "NSFW" flag on submission. NSFW sites may still be found in the Explore directory, but are not featured on the homepage. Any NSFW sites submitted without the correct flag will be banned from Ghost Explore.

How to update or change your site listing

To update or change the details of your site on Ghost Explore, simply go through the same submission flow to add your site again. The old listing will be replaced with the new one.

How are sites ranked on Ghost Explore?

For every site submitted to Explore, we process both private and public data about the site to establish its popularity and reach. Sites are listed in order based on an automatic approximation of their popularity. For transparency, here are all the factors we use to establish the rank of each site:

  • How much traffic a domain gets - powered by OpenRank
  • The link reputation of a domain - powered by OpenRank
  • How many (total) posts a site has published
  • The publishing cadence of a site (posts per month)
  • When the most recently published post was
  • How many members a site has
  • How much revenue a site is generating from paid subscriptions
  • A custom weight, optionally assigned by Ghost staff

Creators who give permission to share member and/or revenue data about their sites are always featured ahead of those who do not, so this is the easiest way to get your site featured more prominently.

How are sites featured on Ghost Explore?

Ghost staff manually curate and select some sites to be featured at the top of Ghost Explore with a highlighted listing and an additional feature image. We feature sites we love, that represent Ghost being used in a way that we think is valuable.

There is no way to pay to be featured, and we do not fund or give money to any Ghost publishers to use the product. If this ever changes in the future, we'll be 100% transparent about any publishers who we have a direct relationship with.

What is not allowed on Ghost Explore?

We accept any/all Ghost sites to the Explore directory that adhere to our Code of Conduct, Terms of Service, and Abuse policies; whether self-hosted or running on Ghost(Pro).

Ghost Explore is intended to promote positive use of the Ghost platform around the world, and so we may, at our sole discretion, remove any sites that we feel do not support that mission.

You have unlimited freedom to publish anything you like on your own website, but what gets featured in Ghost Explore is up to us.

Finally: Your site title must bear a close resemblance to your domain name. If your title is completely different to your domain, or you add extra key words or special characters to it, we may edit any site meta data to keep listings clean and consistent. If you repeatedly submit a site title that does not follow these guidelines, your Explore listing may be removed.