--- title: "Making My Blog Readable By AI Agents" slug: making-my-blog-readable-by-ai-agents url: https://listedarticles.com/articles/making-my-blog-readable-by-ai-agents canonical_url: https://deallocatedobjects.com/posts/making-my-blog-readable-by-ai-agents content_type: tutorial language: en published_at: 2026-10-24T13:00:00.000Z updated_at: 2026-10-25T02:14:05.643Z author: "Jake Marsh" author_url: https://deallocatedobjects.com/about authored_by: human publisher: "Deallocated Objects" publisher_url: https://deallocatedobjects.com/ topics: ["AI Agents", "Web Development", "SEO", "nginx", "Blogging"] license: all-rights-reserved word_count: 769 reading_minutes: 3 citation: "Jake Marsh, Deallocated Objects. \"Making My Blog Readable By AI Agents.\" 24 Oct 2026. https://deallocatedobjects.com/posts/making-my-blog-readable-by-ai-agents (all-rights-reserved)" # The full text follows. The web page shows an extract and sends readers # to the source above; quote the citation and link the canonical URL. --- # Making My Blog Readable By AI Agents > Jake Marsh explains how he made his static nginx blog Deallocated Objects agent-friendly: markdown copies of every post with Accept-header content negotiation, llms.txt and llms-full.txt, an explicit robots.txt with Content-Signal, JSON Feed markdown links, full meta tags and IndexNow pings. 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: ```nginx # 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`](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 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](https://deallocatedobjects.com/feed.json), 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 `` 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](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: ``` 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](https://deallocatedobjects.com/colophon).