[erichurkman]

Conjecture: Hugo and friends generate static file sites can touch on high signal for search engines: fast load times, meaningful cross-linking, responsive templates, minimal (if any) cross-domain loads, and new in 2020: minimal 'cumulative layout shift' and 'largest contentful paint'.

Not to say that you couldn't construct some monstrosity of a site with Hugo, but you're more likely to do that with a mess of half-maintained Wordpress plugins.

[3131s]

Is the HTML that Hugo generates semantic and does it contain the usual metadata that search engines use?

[chrisdalke]

Hugo’s HTML generation is very lightweight and basically outputs whatever your HTML theme template tells it to— so with a bit of work your site can be very SEO-friendly.

[aliceryhl]

This is up to the template files.