Preparing your website for LLMs.

Speakeasy, a company focused on optimizing product presentation for both humans and machines, recently assessed its own website's readiness for AI agents and discovered significant challenges in accessibility and navigation due to heavy use of React and complex site structure. As AI agents, such as chatbots and virtual assistants, are becoming increasingly important for discovering and interacting with content, Speakeasy transitioned its site to support markdown format, facilitating better parsing and understanding by these agents. Markdown, being context-rich and familiar to LLMs, allows for more efficient information delivery compared to traditional HTML. Speakeasy implemented an API endpoint to serve markdown content directly, enhancing agent readability and creating an llms.txt file to index these resources, despite uncertainty about its current utilization by LLM providers. The company also introduced an "agent mode" toggle to illustrate the disparity between human and machine-readable content, underscoring the importance of machine-readability for future-proofing web content. Speakeasy's approach reflects a proactive stance on the shifting landscape of content consumption driven by AI, emphasizing the low cost of early adoption against the potential future benefits.