What Is humans.txt? The File That's Not for Search Engines at All
Most files sitting at a site's root exist for a machine: robots.txt for crawlers, sitemap.xml for search engines, llms.txt for AI models. humans.txt breaks that pattern on purpose — it's a plain-text file, at the same kind of predictable location, written for the one category of visitor none of the other files address: an actual person who goes looking.
Where it came from
The convention dates back to around 2011, published at humanstxt.org, with a simple pitch: websites are built by people, but almost nothing about a typical page says who. A humans.txt file at yoursite.com/humans.txt fixes that with a few lines of plain text — no build step, no CMS plugin, just a file. It never became an official standard the way robots.txt effectively has, but it picked up enough adoption among agencies, personal sites, and open-source projects that it's still recognizable today, even if most visitors have never heard of it.
What's actually in one
The loose convention groups content into a few named sections, each wrapped in a comment-style header:
- /* TEAM */ — who worked on the site: role, name, and optionally a contact or location for each person.
- /* THANKS */ — people, projects, or open-source libraries the team wants to credit without giving them a full team entry.
- /* SITE */ — technical details about the build itself: last update date, standards used (HTML5, CSS3), components or frameworks, and the software the team built it with.
- /* NOTE */ — anything else, usually a short personal line.
None of these are enforced by a spec in any strict sense — it's closer to a widely-recognized template than a validated format, which is part of why it's stayed so simple for over a decade.
Who actually reads it
Realistically: other developers who know the convention exists and check out of curiosity, a handful of browser extensions built specifically to surface humans.txt files, and occasionally a recruiter or client doing due diligence on who built a site. It is not fetched by Googlebot, not parsed by ChatGPT or Claude when they visit a page, and has no mechanism for influencing search rankings or AI answers — that's the clearest way to tell it apart from robots.txt or llms.txt, both of which exist specifically because an automated system reads them.
Is it worth adding?
As a ranking or visibility lever, no — treat that expectation as settled. As a low-cost way to put a name on work that would otherwise go uncredited — a freelancer's site, a small agency's client project, a personal build — it costs a few minutes and a handful of lines. Whether that's worth doing is closer to a personal or team preference than a technical decision.
Generate one
FreeToolDev's humans.txt generator turns a short list of team members, credits, and a few site details into a properly formatted file — free, no email required, generated entirely in your browser.