An autolink is a standing instruction to your site build: wherever this phrase appears in body copy, make it a link to this page. You define the term once — your product name, a feature, a piece of jargon your writers use constantly — and every page that mentions it links to the page you chose, without any author remembering to add the link and without anyone editing fifty pages when the target moves.
Where autolinks live
Open Settings from the bottom of the left rail, then the Automation & AI group, then the Automations card. The route is /settings/automations.
Two things about that card are worth saying plainly before you go looking for something that is not there.
The card’s description reads “Rules that publish, route, or notify on triggers.” The screen behind it contains exactly one thing: a section headed Auto-Linking, described as “Identify words and phrases from specific page types to automatically insert hyperlinks to other content.” There is no rules engine, no trigger builder and no routing. Autolinking is the whole of Automations today.
The card sitting next to it, Search & autolinks, goes somewhere else entirely — /settings/searchindexes, where you configure the search index behind a documentation set. Its description also mentions crosslink rules, which is the source of most of the confusion. If you are here for the phrase-to-page mapping, you want Automations; see search for your documentation for the other one.
Adding, editing, reordering and deleting terms needs autolinks:write, which the Content Writer role carries. Everyone from Read Only upward can see the list.
Managing terms
Each row pairs one word or phrase with one target page.
Type the phrase into the New Word or Phrase field at the top of the section and add it; a row appears carrying that phrase, ready to edit. Then pick its destination from the page picker on the right — a searchable combobox over every page in your workspace, filtered on the page’s title as you type, so you never have to type or paste a URL. Both halves autosave about a second after you stop typing, and again the moment the field loses focus; there is no Save button. The trash icon at the end of a row removes it.
Drag a row to reorder it. Order is match precedence, applied strictly top to bottom, and it only matters when two terms overlap. If you have both journey and journey stages, put journey stages above journey — otherwise journey is applied first and rewrites those seven characters into a link, after which journey stages no longer exists as a contiguous phrase for the longer term to find.
A term does nothing until it has a target. A row whose page picker is still empty is skipped by the build, silently and by design, so a half-finished row is harmless. So is a row pointing at a page that has not been published: the build resolves the target against the pages it is actually rendering, and a term whose target is not among them is skipped for that whole build.
What the build actually does
Autolinking runs during the site build, inside the same process step that expands Handlebars partials in your rendered content — see how templates work for where that sits in the pipeline. It works on the rendered HTML of each page, one page at a time, applying your terms in list order.
The rules are independent conditions, not a sequence, and each one exists to stop a specific kind of damage.
| Rule | What it means in practice | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Case-insensitive matching | The term is matched regardless of capitalization, and the page keeps its own — the link text is whatever the page actually wrote | Term journey stages links Journey Stages, journey stages and JOURNEY STAGES |
| Body text only | Only text inside paragraph, unordered-list and ordered-list elements is considered. Headings, table cells, code blocks, image captions and anything else are never touched. A paragraph inside a blockquote or an alert is still a paragraph, so it is fair game | A heading reading Journey stages is left alone; the paragraph under it is not |
| Word boundaries | The characters immediately before and after the match must not be letters or digits. Punctuation, hyphens and slashes all count as boundaries | Term art never matches inside smart; term linking does match inside auto-linking, because a hyphen is a boundary |
| One link per term per page | Once a term has been linked on a page, the rest of its mentions on that page are left as plain text | A page that says pricing nine times gets one pricing link, not nine |
| Never self-links | A page is never linked to itself, so the term is simply skipped on its own target page | The pricing page does not autolink the word pricing |
Anchors carrying data-reason are left alone | An existing link that already has a data-reason attribute — including one a previous autolink made — is never touched | A tracked call-to-action link keeps its own destination |
| Order is precedence | Terms are applied top to bottom; the first one to claim a page’s single match for its phrase wins | Put journey stages above journey |
Attribution
Every link the build inserts carries a data-reason attribute describing where it came from: utm_campaign=leed&utm_source=internal&utm_medium=autolink&utm_content=<the term>. The utm_medium=autolink part is what lets your analytics separate traffic that came from an automatically inserted link from traffic that came from a link an author placed deliberately, and utm_content tells you which term produced it. That is worth checking before you invest in more terms — see journeys, funnels and attribution for reading the numbers.
The attribute is also the marker the build reads on the next run, which is why it doubles as the “hands off this link” signal described above.
Turning autolinking off
Three switches control whether a page gets autolinked, and all three have to allow it. Two of them are yours; the first is your plan.
| Scope | Where | Effect | Does anything tell you? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Your plan | Nothing to set — the build reads your tier | Below Starter, no autolinking happens anywhere on the site | No. One line in the build log, nothing in the CMS |
| A whole section | Enable Autolinking on the page type, in Settings → Page Types | Turns autolinking off for every page of that type | Yes — the checkbox is visible on the page type |
| A single page | Disable Autolinks, in the Automations group of the editor’s Page settings tab | Exempts that one page | Yes — the checkbox is visible on the page |
Enable Autolinking is on by default for a new page type, and it is one of the few settings that exists on documentation and API page types as well as posts types — configuring a page type covers it alongside the rest of the panel. The per-page Disable Autolinks checkbox sits directly under Disable Dynamic CTA in the same group; page settings walks the whole tab.
Turning it off is the right answer more often than people expect. Legal pages, a landing page built around a single call to action, and the target pages themselves all read worse with injected links in them.
When changes take effect
Editing a term changes nothing on your live site by itself. The autolink list is marked as having unpublished changes, and a single Autolinks entry appears on the Deploy tab. Publishing it writes the list into your site repository as src/_data/autolink.json, and the build that follows is the one that inserts the links. So the sequence is always: edit here, publish on Deploy, wait for the build — see publishing changes.
Because the links are inserted at build time rather than stored in your pages, a term you delete disappears from every page on the next build. Nothing is written into your content, and there is nothing to clean up.
Choosing good terms
Keep the list short. Every term is checked against every paragraph of every page on every build, and a long list of loosely chosen phrases produces pages that read like a densely hyperlinked encyclopedia entry. A dozen well-chosen terms usually does more for a reader than eighty.
Prefer specific phrases over single common words. journey stages is a good term; journey is not, because it will fire on any sentence containing the word in an unrelated sense, and the one-link-per-page rule means it may take the slot you wanted for something better.
Working with terms from an AI client
An MCP client connected to Leed can read and add terms: list_autolinks returns every phrase-to-page mapping, and create_autolink adds one. There is no delete tool over MCP — removing a term is done here, or by Leed’s in-app assistant, which treats it as a high-risk action and asks for your approval first. MCP tools for site structure sets out the full surface.