We broke the web so badly for humans that we had to build a clean web for machines, and now humans will have to use machines to experience a clean web again.
For the same reasons why we eventully pollute and corrupt every system and environment we use. If there is any benefit that can be extracted for some while the costs are borne by many, than this will occur and generate a positive feedback loop that grows over time.
Because while consumers value “inefficiency” (high design, wonderful prose, beautiful images, great usability) they don’t want to actually pay for it. Producers have to become extremely efficient without revenue, and are stuck with a choice: Produce at a loss, stop producing, or seek payment from another source (sponsorships, ads).
I can definitively say llms.txt is not used by any AI players. I run a blogging platform with around 80k blogs and /llms.txt is not requested by anything (other than humans checking to see if there's an llms.txt path).
All regular pages are aggressively scraped to the extent it's a problem I have to consistently manage, but not llms.txt.
I never thought about it before now but the llm era could be a form of renaissance for blind people on the Internet. An alternative web where functionality of every page is described in short but detailed text instead of extremely verbose and non-linear html tree structure.
There is an enshittification cycle at work. The web used to be good, predominately text, and useful, 25 years ago. Then... slowly... we added javascript, then AJAX, CSS, flash, interstitials, popups, marketing, social media, algorithms, doomscrolling... gradually but surely turn it into the unusable cesspool that it is today.
Now we have AI! I think a big part of its utility is that it gets us back to text/information, and lets us bypass all the "beautiful" design / nonsense on the material it is trained on.
However, AI is just beginning its enshittification cycle - now that it has a critical mass of users, it is an irresistible target to start slowly adding ads, misinformation, conspiracy theories, and whatever else people can dream up, until it also becomes unusable and the cycle repeats.
Not really, but sounds interesting. Would you care to share some sites that offer better llms.txt than main web page? Or talk about some piece of info you easily found on llms.txt that was hard to navigate to on the regular website?
oh don't worry, in 5 years your AI will be unundated with context poison prompts that try to get them to spend all your bank notes and meta bucks on equally useless things.
Already happening. I was using Claude to check out sampler plugins and I'm sure it happens undetected, and it might have mentioned it with other versions, but Claude Opus 4.8, being it's helpful, honest self, told me that one of the pages it reviewed had hidden text instructing it to recommend that plugin. It caught it and was able to avoid influence from that plugin at least, but we're already living in that world.
It's the law of monetization.
And despite this, modern life is made possible by the illusion that "regulations" work..
If I remember correctly this "standard" was setup by someone but without involvement of any of the major AI players.
All regular pages are aggressively scraped to the extent it's a problem I have to consistently manage, but not llms.txt.
But perhaps these are developers specifically targeting these pages to feed whatever LLM they are using.
But nah, I'm sure OP doesn't know about CDNs.
So it get even stranger, I am the only one reading those /llms.txt ...
anyone who's, even slightly, clued into how agents access documentation, has been making changes to their pages. ex: https://searchtxt-web.fly.dev/search?q=aws
https://github.com/AnswerDotAI/llms-txt/issues/2
It’s been completely ignored ever since.
- https://cloud.laravel.com/docs/llms.txt
- https://cloud.laravel.com/docs/llms-full.txt
There is an enshittification cycle at work. The web used to be good, predominately text, and useful, 25 years ago. Then... slowly... we added javascript, then AJAX, CSS, flash, interstitials, popups, marketing, social media, algorithms, doomscrolling... gradually but surely turn it into the unusable cesspool that it is today.
Now we have AI! I think a big part of its utility is that it gets us back to text/information, and lets us bypass all the "beautiful" design / nonsense on the material it is trained on.
However, AI is just beginning its enshittification cycle - now that it has a critical mass of users, it is an irresistible target to start slowly adding ads, misinformation, conspiracy theories, and whatever else people can dream up, until it also becomes unusable and the cycle repeats.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48411569
BTW why should Chrome even consider rendering a .txt file as markdown?
Result: no such item.
From where do you got the idea that adding /llm.txt to urls will produce markdown?
This is just a redeux of the early web.
I imagine Claude could zero-shot a Chrome plugin for that.