Making My Blog Readable By AI Agents

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#

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:

https://deallocatedobjects.com/posts/the-art-of-the-reveal.md

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:

# http context
map $http_accept $deallocated_md {
    default "";
    "~*text/markdown" ".md";
}

# server block
location ~ ^/posts/[^/.]+$ {
    if ($deallocated_md) { rewrite ^ $uri.md last; }
    try_files $uri.html =404;
}

Try it:

curl -H "Accept: text/markdown" https://deallocatedobjects.com/posts/the-art-of-the-reveal

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 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, 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#

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:

User-agent: *
Allow: /
Content-Signal: search=yes, ai-input=yes, ai-train=yes

That’s the right call for a blog. I want to be cited. A product site might choose differently.

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, where each item carries a _markdown_url (JSON Feed allows custom keys that start with an underscore).

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 <img> 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#

Last, an IndexNow 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:

curl -H "Accept: text/markdown" https://deallocatedobjects.com/posts/making-my-blog-readable-by-ai-agents

The rest of how this site is built is in the colophon.