# Build websites that agents can read
> Why I publish llms.txt, raw Markdown, and JSON-LD alongside every page — and how it changes who your site is for.
Author: Howard Peng (https://howard-peng.xyz)
Published: 2026-06-25
Canonical: https://howard-peng.xyz/2026/agent-readable-websites
Tags: web, agents, geo

---

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.

```txt
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`](/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.