---
title: Publish agent manifests
description: Auto-generated manifests that tell AI agents what your product is and how to read and edit your docs.
url: https://pr-7-a9c4e9fe1b6c.thally.app/guides/agent-manifests
---

# Publish agent manifests

Auto-generated manifests that tell AI agents what your product is and how to read and edit your docs.

Thally publishes a set of agent-facing surfaces automatically. They all come
from the same content graph, so agents can discover, retrieve, cite, and safely
edit your documentation without relying on a second copy of the content.

## `skill.md` — a capability manifest

Served at **`/skill.md`**, this is a Claude-skill-shaped description of what your
product is and how an agent can read your docs programmatically. It tells the
agent to search before reading deeply, cite canonical page URLs, separate
documented facts from inference, and treat the public MCP server as read-only.

## `AGENTS.md` — guidance for editing the docs

Served at **`/AGENTS.md`**, this tells an agent *working on your repo* how the
project is laid out and how to add or edit pages safely. It covers task-focused
page structure, `docs.json` navigation, ownership boundaries, product-fact
verification, validation, browser review, and actions that require explicit
approval. It's also the config surface the `thally agent` reads.

> **Note:**
Drop a physical `AGENTS.md` at your project root to override the generated one
with hand-tuned guidance — style rules, files to never touch, review requirements.
The file wins over the generated default.

## Discovery and retrieval surfaces

| Surface | What it gives an agent |
| --- | --- |
| `/llms.txt` | A concise documentation index and the recommended retrieval workflow |
| `/llms-full.txt` | The complete published corpus in one text response |
| `/.well-known/llms.txt` | A standards-friendly mirror of the concise index |
| `/ai.txt` | Content-negotiation rules, allowed agent routes, and retrieval endpoints |
| `/robots.txt` | Crawler permissions plus pointers to `llms.txt`, `skill.md`, and `AGENTS.md` |
| `/api/docs-index` | A structured JSON index with page metadata and discovery links |
| `/api/search` | Ranked page discovery for a natural-language query |
| `/api/docs/{slug}` | One page as JSON, JSON-LD, or Markdown |
| `/api/mcp` | Four public, read-only tools for search, page retrieval, listing, and readiness |
| `/api/agent-readiness` | A machine-readable report of missing or weak agent surfaces |

Thally advertises `/llms.txt` on every page with
`Link: </llms.txt>; rel="llms-txt"` and `X-Llms-Txt` response headers. Agents can
start from any discovery surface without guessing undocumented routes.