Member Avatar for hex20dec

So I see humans.txt http://humanstxt.org/ pop up all over the web lately and was wondering if it has any effect on seo?
Google even has it on their root domain http://www.google.com/humans.txt

Should I add it to my site? Does google crawl it?

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Short answer: humans.txt is a human‑readable credit file — a nicety, not a ranking signal. It’s a community convention for listing people/tools behind a site; it’s optional and not something Google uses to boost rankings. Wikipedia: humans.txt and several practical write‑ups treat it as informational rather than SEO leverage. (en.wikipedia.org)

If you add one: keep it tiny, place it at your site root (text/plain), and do not publish sensitive personal data or unverified contact info. If you don’t want the file showing up in search results, return an HTTP header X-Robots-Tag: noindex for that file (this works for non‑HTML resources). For vulnerability contacts, use a proper security.txt at /.well-known/ (RFC 9116) instead of stuffing private emails into humans.txt. To control automated crawlers (including AI crawlers), rely on robots.txt and provider opt‑out mechanisms (for example, OpenAI publishes guidance for GPTBot). (developers.google.com)

A quick, minimal example (plain text) you can adapt:

SITE: Example Corp
LAST-UPDATE: 2025-11-01
TEAM: Jane Doe — Developer — https://example.com/team/jane
THANKS: Open source projects…

Note: emerging files like llms.txt have been proposed for AI/LLM guidance, but they are not broadly relied on by major AI systems as of mid‑2025 (per Google’s John Mueller). If your goal is to signal authorship or E‑E‑A‑T to search engines, prefer clear about/team pages and structured data (Article/Person JSON‑LD) — that is what Google documents recommend for author info. ()

Bottom line checklist: add humans.txt only for transparency/credits, never as an SEO tactic; avoid PII; use X‑Robots‑Tag to keep it out of search if desired; use security.txt for vulnerability contacts; use robots.txt and provider docs to manage AI crawlers. (Good question, — and thanks to , and for the discussion points above.)

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Member Avatar for Dani

I have never heard of humans.txt before, but my first guess is that it does not help SEO in any substanial way. That being said, the homepage you linked to does encourage the use of <link type="text/plain" rel="author" href="" />. It's a good general rule of thumb to use the rel=author tag to link to a website about the creator of the specific webpage. Google likes to see this be a Google+ profile (hint hint wink wink) because then they can extrapolate all sorts of extra information about the author of the page content, but links to the author's blog, twitter, linkedin, career portfolio, etc. all work too. This actually used to be much more important than it currently is since Google deprecated authorship within search results in 2014 (because not enough people were using Google+, the theory goes).

All that being said, as humans.txt becomes more popular, I can see Google using it as a supplemental hint for the descriptions in search result pages, which today tend to be combinations of page content, the meta description tag, and Google's own fumbling around.

Member Avatar for advent_geek

, Thanks for the info. so far, I don't have any idea about humantxt. but i had understand what mean that.

From humanstxt itself they were said it was for the prpose of human to read what you are and about your team.

Note:- by adding this, we may add our website name on Humantxt list

Kind Regards

Member Avatar for iamrichard

It appears to be a marketing stunt by Google to get people to see their careers pages and hopefully attract intelligent qualified people to work for them. It seems to have worked to a limited degree if you have seen it all over the web.

Edited by iamrichard
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