a14y: Agent readability for the web

2 min read Original article ↗

v0.2.0 Open spec, open tools, public leaderboard.

Agents now read most of the web before humans do. a14y is the open source project making the web readable by those agents. In one study, raising a site's a14y score from 37 to 89 decreased Claude's token use by 49% and tool calls by 52% with no change in answer quality.

run npx a14y your-site.com skill npx skills add timothyjordan/a14y

Scan a page now

Runs in your browser using the same engine as the CLI for a single page, no install required.

Scanned URLs are fetched through an a14y proxy and are not stored.

  1. 01

    Run the scorecard

    From the CLI, the Chrome extension, or by handing the job to a coding agent with the a14y skill. Same engine, same score.

  2. 02

    Fix what failed

    Every failing check links to its detection rule and a fix. Pipe --output agent-prompt into a coding agent to ship the changes as a PR.

  3. 03

    Re-run & share

    Run again to confirm the score climbed, then embed your badge so agents (and humans) know your site is ready.

Every check is a complete recipe

a14y documents what each check looks for, why it matters, and exactly how to ship the fix. Making your site readable to agents should be a checklist, not a research project.

One of 38 · v0.2.0 · site check

llms-txt.exists

llms.txt is published

Why it matters

An llms.txt at a well-known location is the agent equivalent of a sitemap. It tells AI ingesters which pages are worth reading and gives them a single, deterministic starting point for crawling.

How we check

GET /llms.txt, then /.well-known/llms.txt, then /docs/llms.txt. Any 2xx response passes. Falls back to the llms-full.txt variants before failing.

How to implement

Publish a plain-text llms.txt at your site root (or under /.well-known/) listing the pages worth reading. The format is intentionally simple: markdown links, headings, or free text. No HTML parser needed.

Open tools, three surfaces. Sub-second per page, CI-friendly, and headless. Score a single URL or an entire site against the same versioned checks the public leaderboard uses.