llms.txt saves an agent real tokens, but it won't read it unless you ask

A controlled benchmark: a clean llms.txt discovery layer cuts an AI agent's tokens, but no in-page link (a head tag or a visible footer link) got the agent to use it on its own. One line in the prompt did. The lever is the instruction, not the markup.

· Engineering · Artificial Intelligence

Which agent-readiness features actually pay off

We toggled each of a14y.dev's 11 agent-readiness features on and off and measured what each one is worth to an AI agent. A markdown mirror and a real meta description do most of the work, the features don't simply stack, and one of them actively makes things worse.

· Engineering · Artificial Intelligence

The State of Agent Readability on the Web

We scored the 50,074 most-visited websites for how well an AI agent can discover, parse, and comprehend them. The median scores 52 of 100, not one scored excellent, and roughly three in four haven't shipped the agent-readability layer that halves what an agent spends to use a site.

· Engineering · Artificial Intelligence

Recent

  1. The Ghost of PageRank: AI Spam Will Backfire

    In the early days of web search, webmasters tried to cheat search algorithms. We're seeing the same thing playing out by those who are trying to game model training with slop content.

  2. Raising an a14y score from 37 to 89 halved an AI agent's token use

    Same docs, same answer quality, statistically indistinguishable judge scores. Running an a14y audit and shipping the top fixes raised the site's score from 37 to 89, and roughly halved Claude's token use and tool calls on the same evaluation.

  3. Make your documentation readable by AI agents

    How to structure developer documentation so that AI agents like Claude Code, ChatGPT, Cursor, Copilot can discover, retrieve, and cite it accurately. Three layers: discovery, retrieval, and tools.

  4. Agent Readability: A Specification for AI-Optimized Websites

    Agent readability is a set of best practices that make your website parseable, navigable, and citable by AI agents like ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, and Copilot. A site-wide spec across discovery, structure, and context.

  5. Building Slack agents can be easy

    Walk-through of the Vercel Slack agent skill, which takes a coding agent (Claude Code, OpenCode, Cursor) from idea to a deployed Slack bot in a single session — handling app config, OAuth, webhooks, and infra.

  6. Hello, Vercel.

    I’ve redeployed timothyjordan.com to Vercel, and I’m super excited to lead the Developer Experience team at a company famous for excellent developer experience.

  7. My exit from Google: we don't say goodbye, we say good journey.

    My farewell letter to 16 years at Google, some accomplishments, and a lot of gratitude.

  8. The Developer Relations Lifecycle

    A overview of the Developer Relations Lifecycle and how it lines up with the product development lifecycle.

  9. Google Prompting Essentials Online Course

    A self-paced, online course for learning how to prompt AI models like a pro.

  10. All Things Open 2024 Keynote: Google Summer of Code

    Had a lovely time celebrating 20 years of Google Summer of Code on stage at the All Things Open keynote this morning.

  11. Celebrating 20 Years of Google Summer of Code

    Reflecting on 20 years of Google Summer of Code — the open-source mentorship program that's connected 21,000+ contributors across 123 countries since 2005.

  12. Origins of the Google Developer Show

    I sat down with Dan Galpin a short while ago to talk about the origins of the Google Developer Show, a look back at the most exciting announcements…

  13. Get ready for Google I/O: Program lineup revealed

    Developers, get ready! Google I/O is just around the corner...

  14. AI + Open Source: A Philosophy of Changing Expectations

    Slides and speaking notes from my Open Source Summit NA 2024 keynote on what 'open' means for AI models and how the open-source community can help land it well.

  15. Enable Two-Factor Authentication for SSH on Ubuntu

    A step-by-step guide on enabling two-factor authentication for SSH on Ubuntu

  16. Roll Your Own Continuous Delivery

    A Google Cloud Build talk on rolling your own continuous delivery pipeline — design choices, integration with GitHub, and the trade-offs between using a managed product and a hand-built pipeline.

  17. The Developer Show — TL;DR 142

    The Google Developer Show, episode 142. Topics include Android Studio 3.3, Get your Android apps ready for 64-bit, Feast: open source feature store for machine learning, Go on Cloud Functions, NVIDIA Tesla T4 GPUs now in beta, and Soft Actor-Critic: Deep Reinforcement Learning for Robotics.

  18. The Developer Show — TL;DR 140

    The Google Developer Show, episode 140. Topics include Cloud DNS forwarding, Cloud SQL, Python 3.7 for App Engine, Cloud Spanner, and Chrome 72 Beta.

  19. The Developer Show — TL;DR 138

    The Google Developer Show, episode 138. Topics include Fast Pair Update, SDK Developers: stay up to date, New GCP regions in Hong Kong and Jakarta, Google Data Studio with Crashlytics data, and Chrome 72 DevTools.

  20. The Developer Show — TL;DR 137

    The Google Developer Show, episode 137. Topics include Wear OS by Google, Cloud Identity and secure LDAP, Associate Cloud Engineer certification in German, Google Cloud IoT and Microchip, Deeper performance insights in Firebase Performance Monitoring, and Redesigned Firebase notifications dashboard.

  21. The Developer Show — TL;DR 136

    The Google Developer Show, episode 136. Topics include NVIDIA Tesla T4 GPUs, Chrome Dev Summit 2018, Dart 2.1, and Register for DevFest OnAir.

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