alt.hn

6/5/2026 at 10:43:28 AM

Ask HN: Is the web for machines (/llm.txt) the one we wished we had as humans?

by sunshine-o

6/5/2026 at 10:50:08 AM

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.

by ahriad

6/5/2026 at 12:38:43 PM

Yeah, when browsers have a "reader mode", it's pretty obvious the plot has been lost somewhere.

by tacostakohashi

6/5/2026 at 12:32:24 PM

We'll finally bring back Gopher.

by sunir

6/5/2026 at 2:21:39 PM

Always loved Gopher

by daniel-alexande

6/5/2026 at 2:28:30 PM

A man can dream.

by gopher_space

6/5/2026 at 11:00:12 AM

I wonder why we broke the web.

by dmos62

6/5/2026 at 11:31:01 AM

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.

It's the law of monetization.

by Eddy_Viscosity2

6/5/2026 at 11:58:23 AM

>than this will occur and generate a positive feedback loop that grows over time.

And despite this, modern life is made possible by the illusion that "regulations" work..

by qsera

6/5/2026 at 3:41:43 PM

Regulations can and do work, but its never a 'one and done' kind of solution because people find workarounds and loopholes. It requires a unceasing effort to maintain the balance.

by Eddy_Viscosity2

6/6/2026 at 2:08:43 AM

That is what I meant when I said it does not work.

by qsera

6/5/2026 at 11:06:38 AM

For money! Ads make money.

by ahriad

6/5/2026 at 12:37:43 PM

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).

by jt2190

6/5/2026 at 12:22:37 PM

It seems there's little agreement over how the web is broken.

by dmos62

6/5/2026 at 12:38:33 PM

People who love cookie banners either don't exist, or are alien invaders :)

by temp8830

6/5/2026 at 11:28:19 AM

In order to break the user, of course.

by functionmouse

6/5/2026 at 11:20:03 AM

To improve the user experience.

by noufalibrahim

6/5/2026 at 11:46:40 AM

[dead]

by throwaway613746

6/5/2026 at 12:32:35 PM

It's a matter of time until the web for machines will be crawling with ads and everything else, and worse.

by soco

6/5/2026 at 11:50:03 AM

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.

by marand23

6/5/2026 at 11:07:48 AM

Does any of the LLM providers actually use llms.txt?

If I remember correctly this "standard" was setup by someone but without involvement of any of the major AI players.

by rickette

6/5/2026 at 11:17:58 AM

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.

by HermanMartinus

6/5/2026 at 11:59:12 AM

I'm seeing quite a bit of request for these on my work's GitBook documentation site.

But perhaps these are developers specifically targeting these pages to feed whatever LLM they are using.

by nickserv

6/5/2026 at 11:29:40 AM

How is a static blog being scraped a problem? Do you not use a CDN?

by isaachinman

6/5/2026 at 11:56:04 AM

> a blogging platform with around 80k blogs

But nah, I'm sure OP doesn't know about CDNs.

by nickserv

6/5/2026 at 11:48:34 AM

Are all blogs static though?

by the_real_cher

6/5/2026 at 12:19:14 PM

Very few blogs require frequent updates. Even with user comments.

by johannes1234321

6/5/2026 at 12:17:17 PM

Amazing, I didn't know.

So it get even stranger, I am the only one reading those /llms.txt ...

by sunshine-o

6/5/2026 at 12:05:16 PM

> I can definitively say llms.txt is not used by any AI players.

  https://developers.openai.com/llms.txt
  https://docs.anthropic.com/llms.txt
  https://geminicli.com/llms.txt
  https://github.com/llms.txt
  https://docs.aws.amazon.com/llms.txt
  https://openrouter.ai/docs/llms.txt

by 0123456789ABCDE

6/5/2026 at 12:40:37 PM

OP clearly meant that the AI players are not reading and/or honouring llms.txt of other websites when scraping.

by m4tthumphrey

6/5/2026 at 12:47:01 PM

i stand corrected, but what was clear to you, obviously was not clear to me.

by 0123456789ABCDE

6/5/2026 at 2:34:13 PM

No, requesting "Accept: text/markdown" in the headers and returning markdown is the more agreed upon standard at this point.[0]

[0] - https://acceptmarkdown.com/

by solumos

6/5/2026 at 3:21:47 PM

Now, it would be super cool to get markdown and zero javascript bundles…

by kamma4434

6/5/2026 at 2:56:31 PM

This is interesting. I should start incorporating this -- it couldn't hurt to do both.

by christoff12

6/5/2026 at 12:07:34 PM

yes, they do.

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

by 0123456789ABCDE

6/5/2026 at 11:27:31 AM

Why didn't they place it in .well-known? Also, I couldn't find a website that has it.

by skywalqer

6/5/2026 at 11:00:07 AM

What is an example of a site with a good llm.txt?

by realty_geek

6/5/2026 at 11:13:22 AM

It just hasn't been gamed yet

by mohamedkoubaa

6/5/2026 at 12:01:49 PM

Pretty much.

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.

by tacostakohashi

6/5/2026 at 10:52:14 AM

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.

This is just a redeux of the early web.

by cyanydeez

6/5/2026 at 11:47:09 AM

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.

by maccam912

6/5/2026 at 12:40:13 PM

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?

by gobdovan

6/5/2026 at 1:56:15 PM

llms.txt usually includes a clear sitemap and description of information available on a site.

There are also clear definition of the restful scheme and API/data access options.

One very basic example would be the weather channel https://weather.com/llms.txt

by sunshine-o

6/5/2026 at 2:49:49 PM

Thanks, the comparison hit like a bag of bricks.

by gobdovan

6/5/2026 at 12:41:16 PM

No, the spammers are just at the beginning of ruining that too

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48411569

BTW why should Chrome even consider rendering a .txt file as markdown?

by croes

6/5/2026 at 3:10:06 PM

That's what I was thinking... Now spammers will add hidden prompts or things worse than that for the LLMs...

by user568439

6/5/2026 at 11:44:44 AM

no

by jordemort

6/5/2026 at 2:34:56 PM

[flagged]

by Umairq786

6/5/2026 at 11:12:03 AM

[dead]

by aaron695

6/5/2026 at 11:05:32 AM

The only annoyance is web browsers like chrome do not render the markdown.

I imagine Claude could zero-shot a Chrome plugin for that.

by onion2k

6/5/2026 at 12:01:03 PM

Of course plugins that do this already exist. Save your tokens.

by 8organicbits