The site is live, and it's AI-native by default

The site is live. And from the first commit, it was built to be read by machines as easily as by people. You don’t turn that on. You don’t think about it. It just does it.

That’s the part worth pointing at, because you’d never know it was there. Here’s what’s under the hood.

Every page has a plain-text twin

Add .md to the end of any page’s URL and you get the clean markdown source: no layout, no clutter, just the words. It’s the version an AI assistant can read without tripping over the design.

You’re reading the styled version now. Here’s this post as plain markdown. Same words, machine-readable.

A map for the machines

There’s a file at /llms.txt: a plain index of the whole site, written for AI agents, pointing at every page’s markdown twin. It’s the convention forming for “here is my site, in a form you can read.” Most sites don’t have one yet. This one did on day one.

There’s no sitemap.xml here yet: the same idea for search engines, and much older. I built this one first, which is probably the wrong way round.

Structured data on every page

Every page carries structured data that tells a search engine or an AI what it is looking at: that this is an article, who wrote it, when. Invisible to you, load-bearing for them.

Measurement, wired in from the start

Analytics is embedded across the site, with consent handled properly, from the beginning. Not because there’s anything interesting to track yet, but because measurement is something you want in place before you need it, not bolted on after.

Why bother

People are starting to ask an AI assistant what they used to type into Google. When that happens, the site an AI can actually read is the one that gets represented properly. Building it in from the start costs almost nothing; retrofitting it later costs a lot.

It’s the same instinct as the work I do for clients: make the thing legible and measurable, then you can improve it. None of this is the point of the site. It’s the plumbing. But it’s the kind that’s easy to skip and expensive to add back, so it went in first.

More soon.