A while back I added two things to this site to make it legible to AI. Per-page Markdown copies of every post, and an llms.txt file at the root — a plain-text index that points at all of them. This is roughly what you're told to do if you want your writing to turn up when someone asks a chatbot a question. I did it, felt vaguely productive, and moved on.
Then it occurred to me that I had no idea whether anything had ever asked for either file. Everyone writing about this recommends it. Almost nobody seems to check their own server afterwards. So I did.
Two files that are not the same bet
Here's the distinction I didn't know about: those two files pay off in opposite directions.
The Markdown twin only matters once something has already found one of my posts — a person pasting the link, a crawler following it. At that point it hands over a clean copy of the text, stripped of the navigation and the Macintosh skin around it. It's a convenience for a visitor that already arrived.
