AI readiness for independent writers and blogs

One person, a strong archive, and no map to it.

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The moment

Jonas, who has written about typography for a decade

Someone asks an assistant to explain a niche typesetting problem and gets a shallow answer assembled from forum posts, while the definitive essay sits unread on a personal site.

What the agent needs: An explanation, and a source worth crediting.

What actually happens: There is no llms.txt to say what the site is about, no feed, and the post titles are generic enough that nothing signals depth. The forum thread wins on reachability, not quality.

Which dimensions decide it, and why

AIScan grades five dimensions. These are the ones that carry the outcome for this kind of business.

Content

For a single-author archive, llms.txt is the highest-leverage file that exists: a dozen lines saying what this site is, who wrote it and which pieces matter. Nothing else tells an assistant that a small domain is authoritative.

Discoverability

A feed and a complete sitemap are how a personal site is found again after the first visit. Both are usually one config change on a static setup.

Bot access

Independent writers hold the strongest feelings about training use and the least clarity in their robots.txt. Stating the position explicitly is worth more than the argument about it.

The checks that matter here

Fix guides: /docs/checks/content · /docs/checks/discoverability · /llms-txt-generator

Most sites like this run on Astro — read the Astro playbook for where each fix lives.

Questions we get asked

Is llms.txt worth it for a small site?

It is worth more on a small site than a large one. A big brand is known already; a personal domain gets one chance to say what it is and why it is credible.

Should I serve Markdown versions of posts?

If your posts are written in Markdown, publishing the source at a .md twin costs almost nothing and gives agents a cleaner, cheaper read. That is check C1.

Does anyone still read RSS?

Machines do, constantly. A feed is how new work gets noticed without anyone re-crawling your archive.

Can I opt out of training but stay in answers?

That is exactly what Content Signals are for, and it is a more defensible position than a blanket block.

How do I signal expertise?

An about page with a real name, an author block on posts, dates that are visible, and topic consistency. Authority is inferred from structure as much as prose.

What is the first thing to do?

Scan the site, then write llms.txt — the generator at /llms-txt-generator produces a standards-shaped starting point in a minute.

Scan your site and see where you actually stand

Free, no account, about twenty seconds. The report names every failing check by ID, shows the evidence we found, and gives the fix for your platform — plus a hand-off prompt you can paste straight into Claude Code or Cursor.

Run a free scan npx aiscan-cli yoursite.com

Prefer to read first? Browse every check we run or the guide library.

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Also covers: personal blog, writer site, essayist, newsletter, substack alternative, digital garden, notes site, photography blog, travel blog, recipe blog, tech blog, hobby site, portfolio writing, self hosted blog, rss feed, markdown posts, indie web.