Build websites that agents can read

For fifteen years we optimized websites for two readers: humans, and the search crawler that decided which humans would find us. A third reader has arrived, and it doesn't render your CSS, doesn't run your JavaScript, and doesn't care about your hero animation. It wants the text, the structure, and the provenance — and it increasingly decides what gets cited.

So this site ships an agent-readable layer next to the human one.

What that means in practice

Every page has a plain-Markdown twin. Append .md to any post URL and you get the raw source with a small provenance header — title, author, canonical URL, publish date — and nothing else.

GET /2026/agent-readable-websites.md
# Build websites that agents can read
> Why I publish llms.txt, raw Markdown, and JSON-LD ...
Author: Howard Peng (https://howardpeng.com)

There's a /llms.txt index that maps the whole site the way a sitemap.xml does for crawlers, and a /llms-full.txt that inlines every post for a single fetch. Structured data (Person, BlogPosting) ships as JSON-LD in the page head so the facts are machine-readable without scraping prose.

Why bother

Two reasons. First, citation: when an agent can read your claims cleanly — with a source URL and a captured date — it can attribute them. Provenance is the currency. Second, discipline: writing for a reader that has no patience for filler makes the human version better too. Copy is part of the design.

None of this requires a database or a backend. It's just routes that emit text. The cheapest possible infrastructure for the most durable possible audience.