ai.txt — agent readiness

Why an agent cares

It states how the site wants to be credited when an AI system uses its content, which no other file covers. Adoption of the lineage we validate is effectively zero, so a site publishing one has opted in deliberately and is worth getting right.

Adoption

Specification only. A published specification or draft. Deployments are limited to the authors' own demos.

Direction of travel: ► flat, as at 2026-07-28.

The Geodocs spec names no adopters. Originality.ai counted 397 ai.txt files across 3M+ tracked sites (May 2026), mostly the older Spawning opt-out variant.

What we check

Absence is never a finding. Every check below runs only when this technology is detected, so a site that has not adopted this is not assessed on it and appears in no report. 2 of these 2 can fail it. In Lumar these appear once per site, in the site-wide results of each crawl.

Check	Severity	Raises	On whose authority
ai.txt Invalid Source URL	medium	usability	vendor profile: Geodocs AI Agent Content Spec
Supporting documents: Geodocs AI Agent Content Spec Related guidance in Geodocs AI Agent Content Spec. Bad: Source-url isn't an absolute http(s) URL, so agents can't resolve the canonical source to attribute. Fix: use a full URL, e.g. Source-url: https://www.example.com/.
ai.txt Unknown Attribution Value	medium	usability	vendor profile: Geodocs AI Agent Content Spec
Supporting documents: Geodocs AI Agent Content Spec Related guidance in Geodocs AI Agent Content Spec. Bad: Attribution-required is something other than "yes" or "no", so the attribution preference can't be interpreted and is dropped. Fix: set it to exactly yes or no.

Examples

Both run through the same checks as a live scan: the first passes, the second is flagged.

correcttext

User-agent: *
Allow: /

Attribution-required: yes

Source-name: Acme Corporation
Source-url: https://acme.example

Citation-format: [Title] — [Source-name] ([Source-url])

present but wrongtext

User-agent: *
Allow: /

Attribution-required: sometimes

Source-name: Acme Corporation
Source-url: /company/about

Citation-format: [Title] — [Source-name]

Specifications

Document	Revision	Kind
Geodocs AI Agent Content Spec	May 2026	specification

Last re-read against the published documents: 2026-10-05.