---
title: "Humans.txt (humans.txt)"
description: "Attribution for the people behind the site."
canonical: "https://geordy.ai/formats/humans-txt"
---
# Humans.txt

**Attribution for the people behind the site.**

Names the team, tools, and timestamps behind the site. AI engines increasingly use this for trust and authorship signals.

Humans.txt is a plain text file format that provides a human-readable way to credit website creators, designers, developers, and contributors, promoting transparency and recognition. It establishes authorship signals, helps AI systems understand content provenance, and improves E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) credibility markers.

## At a glance

- File: `humans.txt`
- First released: 2011
- Created by: Abel Cabans
- Specification: https://humanstxt.org/Standard.html
- Read by: Ethical AI systems, Attribution validators, Trust raters

## Why it matters for AI

humans.txt is a tiny, well-known plain-text file that names the real people, tools and credits behind a site, giving crawlers, archivists and AI assistants a single canonical place to attribute authorship and team identity without scraping bylines from many pages.

## Example

```
/* TEAM */
Founder & CEO: Alex Morgan
Head of AI Research: Dr. Sarah Chen
Lead Engineer: Jordan Kim

/* SITE */
Last update: 2024-01-15
Standards: AI-optimized formats, Schema.org
Components: Next.js, React, TypeScript
```

## Benefits

- Simple format requiring no special tools
- Promotes transparency
- Improves credibility signals (E-A-T)

## Limitations

- Limited adoption
- Requires manual updates
- Minimal traditional SEO impact

## Best practices

- 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 */.

## Pitfalls

- 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

- **Agency attribution**
- **Product company credibility**
- **Content publisher transparency**

## Adopters

- Google (https://www.google.com/humans.txt)
- GitHub (https://github.com/humans.txt)
- BBC (https://www.bbc.co.uk/humans.txt)
- NPR (https://www.npr.org/humans.txt)
- humanstxt.org itself (https://humanstxt.org/humans.txt)
---

Source: https://geordy.ai/formats/humans-txt
This is a machine-readable markdown version of that page, generated by Geordy.