Humans.txt
Attribution for the people behind the site.
humans.txt is a tiny, well-known plain-text file that names the real people, tools and credits behind a site. Its value is that the address is conventional and the answer is in one place: anyone who needs to know who maintains this site, or when it was last touched, has somewhere to look that is not an about page written in marketing voice. Nothing consumes it automatically, and that is worth knowing before you spend time on it.
Geordy generates this format for every page on your site that warrants it - auto-detected by page type, served from your subdomain, and refreshed on the cadence below.
/* TEAM */ Site: Geordy Role: AI visibility platform Contact: https://geordy.ai/ /* SITE */ Standards: Schema.org, JSON-LD, YAML Components: Next.js, React, TypeScript Doctype: HTML5
How to make this format work for AI.
- Save the file as /humans.txt (always lower-case) at the site root, UTF-8 encoded.
- Reference it from the document head with `<link rel="author" type="text/plain" href="/humans.txt">` so crawlers discover it.
- Use the conventional /* TEAM */, /* THANKS */ and /* SITE */ section headers so parsers and humans both recognise the structure.
- Include role, name, contact (handle or URL - avoid raw email to limit spam), location, plus a Last update line in /* SITE */.
- Naming it Humans.txt or humans.TXT (case matters on Linux web servers) so the file 404s.
- Putting raw email addresses in the file, which attracts spam scrapers - use "name [at] domain" or social handles.
- Letting it go stale: the only signal that the site is human-maintained loses credibility once the Last update date is years old.
Use cases, scored for AI visibility.
Real sites already shipping Humans.txt.
Tools & resources for Humans.txt.
- Simple format requiring no special tools
- Promotes transparency
- Puts authorship and a maintenance date at one fixed address
- No AI engine or search engine documents consuming it
- Limited adoption
- Requires manual updates
- Minimal traditional SEO impact
No AI engine publishes that it reads humans.txt, and this page will not name one that has not. What humans.txt is: one public, conventional address stating who stands behind the site and when it was last maintained, so that answer is the same wherever it is asked for instead of being scattered across bylines and an about page. Cheap to publish, and worth having when somebody asks who is behind a claim.
Written for these readers. Which of them actually request it is measured, not assumed: see how we measure.
- humanstxt.orgAn initiative for knowing the people behind a website, using a plain text file in the site root that credits who built it.
Not measured yet. Geordy will publish which crawlers request this file once enough independent sites are covered. See how we measure.