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Ask HN: Is the web for machines (/llm.txt) the one we wished we had as humans?
I got really tired, as a human, of parsing the standard marketing heavy web we have today.
I've always loved the simplicity of gopher and gemini web.
Recently I found myself manually adding `/llm.txt` to most websites I visit because I find the content for LLMs strait to the point and clear.
The only annoyance is web browsers like chrome do not render the markdown.
So could the AI revolution actually fix the web for humans as a side effect?
Do you find yourself doing the same?
- onion2k 4mo agoThe only annoyance is web browsers like chrome do not render the markdown. I imagine Claude could zero-shot a Chrome plugin for that.
- 8organicbits 4mo agoOf course plugins that do this already exist. Save your tokens.
- ahriad 4mo agoWe 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.
- dmos62 4mo agoI wonder why we broke the web.
- ahriad 4mo agoFor money! Ads make money.
- noufalibrahim 4mo agoTo improve the user experience.
- functionmouse 4mo agoIn order to break the user, of course.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 4mo agoFor 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.
- qsera 4mo ago>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..
- Eddy_Viscosity2 4mo agoRegulations 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.
- qsera 4mo agoThat is what I meant when I said it does not work.
- throwaway613746 4mo ago[dead]
- dmos62 4mo agoIt seems there's little agreement over how the web is broken.
- temp8830 4mo agoPeople who love cookie banners either don't exist, or are alien invaders :)
- jt2190 4mo agoBecause 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).
- takenotice 4mo agoCapitalism
- sunir 4mo agoWe'll finally bring back Gopher.
- daniel-alexande 4mo agoAlways loved Gopher
- gopher_space 4mo agoA man can dream.
- soco 4mo agoIt's a matter of time until the web for machines will be crawling with ads and everything else, and worse.
- tacostakohashi 4mo agoYeah, when browsers have a "reader mode", it's pretty obvious the plot has been lost somewhere.
- cyanydeez 4mo agooh 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.
- maccam912 4mo agoAlready 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.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- realty_geek 4mo agoWhat is an example of a site with a good llm.txt?
- jbrooksuk 4mo agoMintlify generates an llms.txt and llms-full.txt for all documentation sites. These work really well: - https://cloud.laravel.com/docs/llms.txt https://cloud.laravel.com/docs/llms.txt - https://cloud.laravel.com/docs/llms-full.txt https://cloud.laravel.com/docs/llms-full.txt
- pramodbiligiri 4mo agoAnthropic's developer documentation: https://platform.claude.com/llms.txt https://platform.claude.com/llms.txt. There's also https://platform.claude.com/llms-full.txt https://platform.claude.com/llms-full.txt which is (WARNING) much bigger. Not sure where this second one fits into the standard.
- rickette 4mo agoDoes 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.
- HermanMartinus 4mo agoI 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.
- isaachinman 4mo agoHow is a static blog being scraped a problem? Do you not use a CDN?
- the_real_cher 4mo agoAre all blogs static though?
- johannes1234321 4mo agoVery few blogs require frequent updates. Even with user comments.
- nickserv 4mo ago> a blogging platform with around 80k blogs But nah, I'm sure OP doesn't know about CDNs.
- nickserv 4mo agoI'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.
- 4mo ago
- aaron695 4mo ago[dead]
- mohamedkoubaa 4mo agoIt just hasn't been gamed yet
- skywalqer 4mo agoWhy didn't they place it in .well-known? Also, I couldn't find a website that has it.
- 0123456789ABCDE 4mo agohttps://searchtxt-web.fly.dev https://searchtxt-web.fly.dev
- JimDabell 4mo agoPutting it in .well-known/ was immediately raised as an issue from the beginning; it’s issue #2 in fact: https://github.com/AnswerDotAI/llms-txt/issues/2 https://github.com/AnswerDotAI/llms-txt/issues/2 It’s been completely ignored ever since.
- jordemort 4mo agono
- marand23 4mo agoI 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.
- imhoguy 4mo agoIt can be even better. An agent with Playwright MCP can browse even trickiest website structure and simply say what it "sees" and ask the user what to do next, voice or Braille.
- tacostakohashi 4mo agoPretty 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.
- DeathArrow 4mo agoI tried it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48410589`/llm.txt https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48410589`/llm.txt Result: no such item. From where do you got the idea that adding /llm.txt to urls will produce markdown?
- fxwin 4mo agohere: https://llmstxt.org/ https://llmstxt.org/ and obviously it doesn't automatically produce markdown, it's something the website needs to provide (e.g. https://pydantic.dev/llms.txt https://pydantic.dev/llms.txt)
- gobdovan 4mo agoNot 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?
- sunshine-o 4mo agollms.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 https://weather.com/llms.txt
- gobdovan 4mo agoThanks, the comparison hit like a bag of bricks.
- croes 4mo agoNo, the spammers are just at the beginning of ruining that too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48411569 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48411569 BTW why should Chrome even consider rendering a .txt file as markdown?
- user568439 4mo agoThat's what I was thinking... Now spammers will add hidden prompts or things worse than that for the LLMs...
- Umairq786 4mo ago[flagged]