Headless Ghost requires custom theme?

Developer help
1

I’m considering using Ghost as a headless CMS. This Ghost help page says:

  • A headless setup requires a custom theme, to not expose content to search. You can find an example of a theme for use with a headless setup here.

Is this outdated info? I haven’t found anything more about needing a custom theme for headless Ghost, including here on the forums. This page simply suggests enabling Private Mode on the Ghost site:

Disabling Ghost’s default front-end

When using a headless front-end with Ghost, you’ll want to disable Ghost’s default front-end to prevent duplicate content issues where search engines would see the same content on two different domains. The easiest way to do this is to enable ‘Private Site Mode’ under Settings > General - which will put a password on your Ghost install’s front-end, disable all SEO features, and serve a noindex meta tag.

You can also use dynamic redirects, locally or at a DNS level, to forward traffic automatically from the Ghost front-end to your new headless front-end - but this is a more fragile setup. If you use Ghost’s built-in newsletter functionality, unsubscribe links in emails will point to the Ghost origin - and these URLs will break if redirected. Preview URLs and other dynamically generated paths may also behave unexpectedly when blanket redirects are used.

Usually ‘Private Site Mode’ is the better option.