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change(llms-txt): cover the v2 revision — link-relation discovery, path scoping - #174

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change(llms-txt): cover the v2 revision — link-relation discovery, path scoping#174
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change/llms-txt-v2-2026-08-11

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@jdevalk jdevalk commented Aug 11, 2026

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What changed

/llms.txt described v1 of the proposal. llmstxt.org has since published v2, revised after two years of deployment, and the page missed all of it.

  • Discovery by link relation. v2's one hard addition: advertise the file with rel="describedby" — a <link> in the head, an HTTP Link header, or both. v1 expected agents to guess /llms.txt at the root.
  • Path-scoped coverage. A file covers the pages beneath its path, most specific wins, so /docs/llms.txt can describe the docs and nothing else. A large site can participate one section at a time.
  • Both markdown URL shapes acceptedpage.md and page.html.md.
  • ## Optional lost its mechanical semantics, along with the llms_txt2ctx tooling it existed for. It is now a convention for secondary links and nothing more.
  • Adoption paragraph corrected. The page said "no major model vendor has committed to consuming it" and left it there. Publishing is now mainstream — OpenAI, Anthropic and Google each publish one for their own developer docs; Mintlify and GitBook generate them; Chrome's Lighthouse audits for the file under its agentic-browsing checks. Whether any model reads it is still undisclosed, and the page still says so. The now-redundant "assume nobody uses it today" mistake bullet is deleted.

Also: link-headers added to relatedSlugs; a worked-example callout added — the site already emits Link: </llms.txt>; rel="describedby"; type="text/markdown" on every response, so v2 costs us nothing to comply with.

Why now

llms.txt v2 is live at llmstxt.org and changes the page's operative advice, not just its framing. A reader following our v1 instructions ships a file no agent is told about.

Sources

Status

Unchanged at recommended. Adoption broadened and tooling now audits for it, but nothing about the web platform breaks without it, and no vendor has committed to consuming it — required would overstate the case.

Included

  • src/content/spec/agent-readiness/llms-txt.md
  • src/content/changelog/2026-08-11-llms-txt-v2.md (type: changed)
  • public/og/spec/agent-readiness/llms-txt.png — regenerated, the summary changed

npm run build passes; page count unchanged at 168, so no SKILL.md digest change.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

…th scoping

llms.txt published v2 after two years of deployment. The page described v1:
it told readers to put the file at the root and said nothing about how an
agent is meant to find it, which is the one thing v2 changed.

- Advertise the file with rel="describedby" (link element, Link header, or
  both) rather than relying on an agent guessing /llms.txt.
- Coverage is scoped by path, most specific file wins, so a large site can
  participate one section at a time.
- Either markdown URL shape is accepted (page.md or page.html.md).
- ## Optional lost its mechanical semantics along with llms_txt2ctx.
- Adoption paragraph corrected: publishing is mainstream (OpenAI, Anthropic,
  Google, Mintlify, GitBook) and Lighthouse audits for the file; whether any
  model consumes it is still undisclosed. Dropped the now-redundant
  "assume nobody uses it" bullet.
- Added link-headers to relatedSlugs; added the v2 changes page and RFC 8288
  to sources; added the worked-example callout — the site already emits the
  describedby relation on every response.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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