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AI-discoverable docs — overview

AI assistants are now where a meaningful fraction of documentation gets read. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and a long tail of agents all ingest documentation when answering questions about your product. If your docs aren't AI-discoverable, you're invisible in those answers.

Docsio has four built-in levers for this. None requires extra work — they all ship enabled by default — but knowing what they do helps you write docs that take full advantage.

1. llms.txt — auto-generated, every publish

llms.txt is the convention AI crawlers are converging on. It lives at the root of your site (/llms.txt) and lists every doc page with a one-line description and a link to the page's plain markdown.

Docsio generates yours automatically on every publish. Free + Pro both. You can read it at https://docs.yoursite.com/llms.txt after your first publish.

What you control:

  • The page title and description (used as the entry's label).
  • The order (via sidebar_position).
  • Pages with sidebar_class_name: "hidden" are excluded.

→ See the llms.txt deep dive for what to write into descriptions.

2. .md URLs for every page

Every doc page is also available as raw markdown by appending .md to the URL. So https://docs.yoursite.com/intro also serves at https://docs.yoursite.com/intro.md as a plain text file.

This matters because LLMs read markdown more cleanly than HTML. ChatGPT, Claude, and most agent frameworks fetch the .md version when given the option. The Copy page button on every Docsio page links to it.

You don't have to do anything for this — it's automatic.

3. The MCP server (Pro)

Your Pro Docsio site exposes an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server. Anyone using Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, or any MCP-compatible AI tool can plug your docs in directly. The AI then has live, structured access to every page — search, get full text, list categories.

This is the highest-signal lever. Rather than hoping an LLM has indexed your docs, you give it a real-time API into them. Adoption is small but growing fast, and the developers who use it are exactly the ones evaluating tools like yours.

→ See the MCP server guide.

4. The AI chat widget (Pro)

A floating "Ask AI" button on your docs site, trained on your published content. Visitors get answers without leaving the page. Each answer cites the source pages it came from, so readers can click through to the canonical doc.

Different lever than the others — this is for visitors who want a faster path to an answer. It also generates analytics on what people ask, which surfaces gaps in your docs you didn't know you had.

→ See the AI chat widget guide.

The writing layer

The features above are infrastructure. They make your docs findable by AI. To make them useful once found, the writing matters:

  • One concept per page. AI assistants quote pages, and quoting half a page is worse than quoting one tight page.
  • Lead with the answer. The first paragraph should be self-contained — most AI assistants quote the first 200 words.
  • Use markdown structure. Headings, lists, tables, code blocks. Avoid embedding key information in custom components only.
  • Avoid "see the link below" — link inline so the citation makes sense out of context.

→ See Markdown for AI.