humans.txt file

A file at /humans.txt naming the people who built the site. Purely a courtesy.

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humans.txt is an informal initiative from 2011: a plain-text file in the site root that credits the people behind the site — designers, developers, writers — and sometimes lists the tools and standards used to build it. It is the human counterpart of robots.txt, written for curious visitors rather than for crawlers.

It has no effect on search ranking, security or performance, and nothing reads it automatically. The report lists it only as a courtesy: published or not published, never a warning.

How SiteScan checks

The scan requests /humans.txt without following redirects and counts it as published when the answer is a 200 with a non-empty body that is not an HTML page. A site that answers every unknown address with its homepage is therefore not mistaken for having one.

How to add one

There is no strict format. A common layout uses short sections:

• /* TEAM */ with names, roles and where to find each person
• /* THANKS */ for contributors
• /* SITE */ with the last update date, languages and the main technologies

Serve it as text/plain and, if you like, reference it from the page head with a rel="author" link. If you want a file that is actually useful to someone in need, add security.txt first.