Malte Ubl, CTO of Vercel, proposed to implement yet another kind of script in HTML on Wednesday: he wants to take LLMs to another level, embedding inline instructions for agents right on a website markup, and I agree with him. Instead of providing external llms.txt files, you can already make use of scripts.
I’ve already implemented an llms.txt file on my personal website, although it doesn’t include anything useful to date, and I plan to refine it in the near future. Ubl thinks that it’s possible to go even further by developing a new standard which will deal with the increasing number of agents on the web.
Yes, because an agentic era is rising, and we must be ready: for those who don’t know, llms.txt is a proposal similar to humans.txt to serve as a prompt for LLMs visiting your website. It was conceived almost a year ago, and will assist the next generation of search engines.
But what about adding its content directly in HTML, so that you can customize it for every single page, just like you do with metadata? This is the concept behind the new proposal—which suggests to introduce a dedicated kind of script. Even though I think that a standard is far away now, I’ll give it a try.
<script type="text/llms.txt">
Instructions to the LLM go here.
</script>
Browsers will ignore this markup, because a script of type text/llms.txt doesn’t exist yet, while LLMs can look for it in the head section of a web page without affecting its rendering. So, you can start using this immediately: it won’t hurt, but I don’t think that today it would be noticed.
llms.txt is pretty popular, and I hope it will be useful for accessibility as well, but its inline embedding proposal is only two days old and I’ve just read few lines about it. Is it worth starting to use it? It depends on your expectations and objectives, in my opinion. In the worst case scenario, it will be useless.
I like the idea of having a way to instruct LLMs from HTML responses, despite its potential limits. In fact, Vercel uses it to make agents aware of their policy about protected deployments, rather than in public web pages. You can provide the same—and I’m wondering if it could work with 404 Not Found too.
Ubl also mentioned AGENTS.md, an agentic version of README.md I wasn’t aware of. This has been implemented by over 20.000 open source project, so I think I must definitely use it for mine. Codex, Jules, Gemini, etc. already support it: shame on me. I should pay more attention to these news.
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