humans.txt is a text file in the root of a website that names the people who built it, such as developers, designers and writers. The initiative at humanstxt.org describes it as an initiative for knowing the people behind a website. Unlike robots.txt, it is not meant for crawlers.
At a glance
- Type
- Text file (community initiative, no formal specification)
- Visible?
- public at /humans.txt
- Affects
- people, not crawlers
Last checked:
How is it built?
The file is called humans.txt, lives at the site root and is UTF-8 encoded. The initiative suggests two main sections, marked in comment syntax:
/* TEAM */for roles, names and contact details/* SITE */for the last update (YYYY/MM/DD), standards, components and tools
An optional /* THANKS */ section is possible. A link element can point to the file from the <head>, for example <link rel="author" href="humans.txt">.
The initiative presents the file as a counterpart to robots.txt, which holds information for search bots, and does not name search engines as an audience. None of the sources read ties it to rankings.
| File | Standard or proposal? | Location | Purpose | Who reads it (documented) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| robots.txt | IETF standard: RFC 9309 (September 2022) | / | tells crawlers which URLs they may fetch; per the RFC not a form of access authorization | Crawlers; Google's common crawlers always respect it for automatic crawls |
| llms.txt | Proposal (Jeremy Howard, 2024; version 2 from August 2026) | / or in a subpath | Markdown overview linking to Markdown versions of pages, for AI agents | per the proposal mainly coding agents; Google Search ignores it, says Google; Lighthouse only checks the fetch |
| llms-full.txt | no specification; not part of the llms.txt proposal, a convention of individual vendors (e.g. Mintlify) | / (Mintlify also serves /.) | entire documentation as Markdown in one file | no reader documented; Google Search doesn't use such files, says Google |
| ai.txt | Individual IETF Internet-Draft (June 2026, expires 2026-12-14), not a standard; predecessor by Spawning (2023) | /. (draft), / (Spawning) | AI usage preferences (training, scraping, indexing, caching), licensing, attribution | no reader documented in primary sources; Google Search doesn't use 'AI text files', says Google |
TDMRep (tdmrep.) | W3C Community Group Final Report (2024-05-10), not a W3C standard | /., HTTP header tdm-reservation or HTML meta tag | machine-readable reservation of text and data mining rights (Art. 4 DSM Directive) | parties performing text and data mining (per the specification) |
| security.txt | RFC 9116 (April 2022, informational, not standards track) | /. | contact for reporting security vulnerabilities; required fields Contact and Expires | Security researchers |
| ads.txt | IAB Tech Lab specification, version 1.1 (August 2022) | / on the root domain, subdomains as needed | declares the companies authorized to sell the site's ad inventory | advertising systems and buyers (ad system crawlers) |
| humans.txt (this term) | Initiative (humanstxt.org), no formal specification | / next to robots.txt, optionally linked via rel="author" | names the people who contributed to the website | people who want to know who is behind the website |
Only robots.txt, security.txt and ads.txt are based on a finalised specification (IETF or IAB Tech Lab). Google states that Google Search doesn't use new machine-readable files or 'AI text files' and ignores llms.txt files, which neither help nor harm Search visibility. TDMRep is a technical way to express the reservation under Art. 4 of Directive (EU) 2019/790. Not legal advice. Sources: RFC 9309: Robots Exclusion Protocol; Google: Overview of Google crawlers and fetchers (last updated 2026-06-12); The /llms.txt file, v2 (llmstxt.org); llmstxt.org: Changes (v2, August 2026); Google Search Central: Optimizing for generative AI features (last updated 2026-07-10); Chrome for Developers: Lighthouse llms.txt audit (2026-05-05); Mintlify: llms.txt and llms-full.txt; IETF Internet-Draft draft-car-ai-txt-wellknown-00 (2026-06-12); W3C TDMRep Community Group: TDM Reservation Protocol, Final Report 2024-05-10; RFC 9116: A File Format to Aid in Security Vulnerability Disclosure; IAB Tech Lab: ads.txt; IAB Tech Lab: ads.txt Specification Version 1.1 (GitHub); humanstxt.org. Last checked: .
Example
/* TEAM */
Web developer: Jane Doe
Location: Berlin
/* SITE */
Last update: 2026/10/06
Standards: HTML5, CSS3
Common mistakes
- Private email addresses appear in the open file.
- Internal details, such as credentials or server paths, end up in it.
Sources
- humans.txt – humanstxt.orghumanstxt.org
- humans.txt standard – humanstxt.orghumanstxt.org
Last updated: