# Making My Blog Readable by AI Agents > Source: > Published: 2026-10-24 21:21:33+00:00 # Making My Blog Readable By AI Agents [Jake Marsh](https://deallocatedobjects.com/about) A lot of the people reading this blog now aren’t people. They’re agents: Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity and friends, fetching a page because somebody asked them a question. This week I spent an evening making Deallocated Objects nice to read for them (and for search engines while I was in there). The blog is a static site served by nginx, so everything here is either a file generated at build time or a few lines of nginx config. No framework required. ## Markdown For Every Post[#](#markdown-for-every-post) HTML is a lot of noise for an agent to wade through. Every post now also exists as plain markdown. Add `.md` to any post URL: Each file starts with a little YAML frontmatter (title, canonical URL, author, dates, a short description), then the post. The older posts were written in markdown to begin with, so the build just cleans those up and points their images at the self-hosted copies. The nicer trick is content negotiation. If a client asks for markdown in its `Accept` header, it gets markdown from the *normal* URL, no `.md` needed. In nginx that’s a `map` plus one line per location: Try it: Two details matter here. Every response sends `Vary: Accept`, so a cache in the middle never hands HTML to an agent or markdown to a browser. And the `.md` responses send a `Link: <...>; rel="canonical"` header pointing at the HTML page, plus `X-Robots-Tag: noindex`, so Google doesn’t treat them as duplicate copies of every post. ## llms.txt[#](#llms-txt) [`/llms.txt`](https://deallocatedobjects.com/llms.txt) is a plain markdown file at the root of the site that tells an agent what it’s looking at. Mine has a one-line summary of the blog, how to get markdown, where the feeds are, how I’d like posts cited, and a list of every post with a link to its markdown and a one-line summary. There’s also [`/llms-full.txt`](https://deallocatedobjects.com/llms-full.txt), which is the full text of every post in one file (about 225 KB), and `/index.md`, which is the homepage as markdown. Every response also carries a `Link` header pointing at `llms.txt`, so an agent can find it without guessing. ## robots.txt[#](#robots-txt) Silence in `robots.txt` technically means “allowed”, but I’d rather be explicit. Mine allows everyone, then names the big ones explicitly (`GPTBot`, `ClaudeBot`, `PerplexityBot`, `Google-Extended` and about a dozen more) and adds a `Content-Signal` line: That’s the right call for a blog. I *want* to be cited. A product site might choose differently. ## Feeds[#](#feeds) The old Atom feed at `/feed` still works, and every entry now has a summary and a `text/markdown` alternate link. I also added a [JSON Feed](https://deallocatedobjects.com/feed.json), where each item carries a `_markdown_url` (JSON Feed allows custom keys that start with an underscore). ## Meta Tags[#](#meta-tags) The old site had almost none of these, so every page got the full set: - a real meta description, a canonical URL, a robots tag and `lang="en"` - Open Graph and Twitter card tags, including `article:published_time` and`modified_time` - JSON-LD structured data: `BlogPosting` and a breadcrumb on every post, with`WebSite` ,`Blog` and a`Person` for me on the index pages The descriptions were sneakier than I expected. The old database stored a pre-made description for each post, but it had run the paragraphs together (“…your app.The RevealWhat do I mean…”) and a few contained raw `` HTML. Now the build makes its summaries from the rendered post text instead. Two more fixes from the old 2014 markup. The viewport tag had `maximum-scale=1`, which stops people from pinch-zooming on their phones, so that’s gone. And there was no `og:image` at all, so when I shared a post, X and Threads grabbed the first image on the page, which happens to be the Little Bites of Cocoa banner at the top. Every post has a proper 1200x630 preview card now. ## IndexNow[#](#indexnow) Last, an [IndexNow](https://www.indexnow.org) key and a script that pings Bing and friends whenever a post is published. Google doesn’t participate, but Bing’s index feeds a lot of AI search tools, so it’s worth a 30-line script. None of this took long, and most of it is just files. If you have a blog, `llms.txt` and `.md` versions of your posts are a nice place to start. Here’s this post: The rest of how this site is built is in the [colophon](https://deallocatedobjects.com/colophon).