intro.txt - The Missing File Your Website Needs.

madazz01 — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 23:24:44 +0000

You probably know about robots.txt. You might know about llms.txt. But there's a third file your site is missing — and it's the most important one for how AI agents understand who you are.

The problem

AI agents are reading the web constantly. When one visits your site, it has no authoritative source for:

Who you actually are
What your organisation stands for
What you will never do
What you're not (to prevent misclassification)

It infers all of this from your homepage content. Which means it's always guessing.

The three files

File	Answers
robots.txt	What can you touch?
llms.txt	What should you read?
intro.txt	Who am I?

They're complementary. A site should eventually have all three. intro.txt is the one that's been missing.

What intro.txt looks like

# intro.txt — Introduction Layer declaration
# Spec: https://ailattice.io/paper

name:           Acme Corp
canonical_url:  https://acme.com
category:       SaaS / Project Management
mission:        Help teams ship software without the chaos.
core_belief:    Good tooling gets out of your way.

principles:
  - Clarity over completeness
  - Speed is a feature
  - The team is the product

constraints:
  - Will never sell user data to third parties
  - Will never lock exported data in proprietary formats
  - Will never charge for data export

what_this_is_not:
  - Not a replacement for version control
  - Not a reporting tool for executives

Drop it at yourdomain.com/intro.txt. That's it.

The key design decision: constraints are prohibitions

The spec is strict about one thing: constraints must be explicit prohibitions, not aspirational language.

✅ "Will never sell user data to third parties"
❌ "We prioritise user privacy"

The first is actionable. An AI agent can check whether a proposed action violates it. The second is vague enough to mean anything.

Two paths to conformance

Easy path (2 minutes):
Drop /intro.txt at your site root. Plain text. Works on any host, any stack, no code required.

Correct path (full implementation):
Compile a constitution and serve it at GET /constitution with Content-Type: application/constitution+json. This is the machine-native cognitive entrypoint — a conforming AI agent retrieves it before any entity-specific reasoning begins.

Both paths are in the spec. You can start with intro.txt and upgrade later.

It's a W3C standard

The Introduction Layer is governed by the W3C Introduction Layer Community Group — not by us. The spec is CC BY 4.0. The reference implementation (AILattice) is Apache 2.0 with full patent grant.

No single entity can lock this down. That's by design.

What's available

Full specification (15 sections, RFC-style): ailattice.io/paper
Developer hub with quickstart, API docs, conformance tests: ailattice.io/developers
Public registry of certified sites: ailattice.io/registry
GitHub (Apache 2.0): github.com/madazz01/AILattice
Conformance test suite (16 tests, open): /conformance

Add your site

The registry listing is free. The standard is free. The conformance tests are open.

Add intro.txt to your site and submit it to the registry — takes under 3 minutes.

The Invisible Web: Why AI Can't Find Your Website (And How to Fix It)

madazz01 — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 06:53:41 +0000

There's a quiet problem nobody's talking about yet.

AI is becoming the new search engine. People ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude to recommend services, find experts, and compare products. The answers come back confident and detailed — and they're often completely wrong about specific businesses.

Not because the AI is broken. Because your website was never designed for AI to read.

How Google Indexes the Web vs. How AI Does
Google built its index around the way humans browse. PageRank counts who links to you. Crawlers parse your HTML, read your title tags, and measure your page speed. SEO is an entire industry built on this model.

AI doesn't work that way.

When a language model learns about the internet, it reads text. Raw, clean, structured text. It doesn't care about your hero image, your font choice, or your animated scroll effects. It can't "see" your nav menu or parse a React app that renders client-side. It reads what's there, and most modern websites — buried under layers of JavaScript, ads, and design — give it almost nothing useful.

The result: AI hallucinates your address. Gets your pricing wrong. Describes what you do in vague, generic terms because it couldn't find anything specific. Or worse, doesn't mention you at all.

What AI Actually Needs
An AI agent navigating the web needs three things:

A clear entry point — one file that says "this is what this site is, this is what it does, start here"
Structured content — plain prose and lists, not tables inside divs inside carousels
A map — a list of what pages exist and what each one covers
That's it. No design required. No JavaScript. No images. Just text, organized the way a smart reader would organize it.

The AILattice Standard
We built a simple open standard to solve this. Four files, added to any existing website:

/llms.txt — your AI business card. Name, description, what you do, who you serve, and a pointer to your AI entry point. Takes 10 minutes to write.

/ai/index.md — your full AI overview. Write it like you're briefing a very smart assistant who has never heard of you. What problem do you solve? Who are your customers? What makes you different?

/ai/sitemap.md — a list of every AI-navigable page on your site with a one-line description of each. Lets AI agents navigate your content autonomously.

/ai/*.md — topic pages. Products, pricing, about, API docs — whatever is most important for AI to know, written in clean markdown.

That's the whole standard. It's open source (MIT). No vendor lock-in, no proprietary format.

The Registry
Implementing the files gets AI to understand your site. Getting found is a different problem.

AILattice maintains a registry of every site that has implemented the standard. When an AI agent — or a user of one — needs to find something, they can query the registry directly:

GET https://ailattice.io/api/search?q=legal+services+australia
The ranking is organic. No paid placement. Ever. Sites rank by topic relevance, location match, and compliance quality — the same way a librarian would organise a reference section.

The registry is also queryable by AI agents natively as an MCP tool, which means Claude can search it directly without any configuration from you.

How to Implement It
Step 1 — Check your current score:
Go to https://ailattice.io/validate and paste your URL. You'll get a score out of 100 and a checklist of exactly what's missing.

Step 2 — Add the files:
The validator generates the skeleton for you. Fill in the blanks with real information about your business. Be specific — AI rewards specificity.

Step 3 — Get listed:
Once you score 70+, submit to https://ailattice.io/submit. Free listing. No payment required.

Step 4 — Add the discovery tag:
Paste one link tag into your HTML head so AI crawlers know where to find your AI layer:

The whole process takes under an hour for most sites.

Why This Matters Now
Google took years to become dominant. The AI search transition is happening in months.

The sites that structure their content for AI now will have a head start that compounds. Every time an AI recommends you — because it actually understands what you do — that's discoverability that doesn't depend on ad spend or link building.

The invisible web is being built right now. The question is whether your site is in it.

Check your site: https://ailattice.io/validate
View the open standard: https://github.com/madazz01/AILattice
The registry: https://ailattice.io/registry

DEV Community: madazz01