3d ago

Add Markdown Page Versions and Auto-Generated llms.txt

Markdown versions of pages and an auto-generated llms.txt AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity increasingly answer questions by opening web pages live and quoting them. For a directory, that is becoming a real source of visibility. A clean Markdown version of each listing, collection, category and location page (e.g. /listing-slug.md, or served when a client sends Accept: text/markdown) would give these agents just the content, without navigation, scripts, banners or widgets. They would read the facts more reliably and use fewer tokens. Data that is currently shown through JavaScript components, like maps, tabs or filters, would also become plain text they can understand. These pages are also what makes an llms.txt file useful. The llms.txt convention expects links to point to Markdown files, and right now Listable sites have neither. An auto-generated /llms.txt that lists categories, locations and every listing with a one-line description, linking to the .md versions, would make each directory easy for AI tools to navigate. The same Markdown output would let anyone using the directory’s data in their own AI assistant or knowledge base take it as-is, without scraping HTML. Ideally, both would be generated automatically from existing listing data and custom fields, kept in sync on every edit, and could be switched on per site. As a minimum, letting users serve their own files at the domain root (/llms.txt, /.well-known/*) would let us build this ourselves through the API in the meantime. This would be a strong differentiator: none of the directory builders I evaluated offer full Markdown pages, and only one generates an llms.txt, which doesn’t list individual listings.

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