llms.txt and markdown mirrors
The whole site as plain text, plus one .md per page.
Every reed build writes two machine-readable views alongside the HTML. Neither needs
configuration.
llms.txt
Section titled “llms.txt”One file at the root of the output, listing every page with its title, URL and description:
# Reed Docs
> Reed — the documentation compiler. One source, every surface; the output is yours.
## Docs
- [Reed](https://reedbuild.dev/docs/): One source of truth, compiled into every documentation surface.- [Quickstart](https://reedbuild.dev/docs/quickstart/): From nothing to a deployable documentation site in five minutes.Titles and descriptions come from each page’s frontmatter, grouped by your navigation
structure. A page with no description contributes a bare link — which is the most
concrete reason to write one on every page.
URLs are absolute when site is set, and relative when it is not.
Markdown mirrors
Section titled “Markdown mirrors”Every page is also emitted as .md at its own path: reference/diagnostics.md alongside
reference/diagnostics/index.html. A client that wants the content without parsing
rendered HTML fetches the mirror.
A 31-page site produces 31 mirrors — the mapping is exactly one per page, including nested paths.
Serving them correctly
Section titled “Serving them correctly”Static hosts commonly serve .md and .txt as application/octet-stream, which makes a
browser download the file instead of showing it. Reed emits a _headers file with the
right rules:
Content-Type: text/markdown; charset=utf-8
/llms.txt Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8On Cloudflare Pages and Netlify this file is read from the root of the served
directory. If your site is mounted under a path, _headers still belongs at the root —
see Response headers.
Build only
Section titled “Build only”reed dev writes neither. The head link and footer link that point at llms.txt are also
absent under dev, since the file they point at does not exist there. Check these against
a real build.
Discovery
Section titled “Discovery”Three things point at llms.txt — a <head> link on every page, a comment in
robots.txt, and a footer link. See Discovery.