Glossary Term

Digital Karma Federation

The open standard every site in this portfolio uses to publish machine-readable files about itself, so AI systems can read the site without guessing.

The Digital Karma Federation is a set of small public files a website publishes at fixed addresses: a manifest that says who the site is, a catalog of what it publishes, a health file, a sitemap for AI systems, and a few others. Every file carries the same protocol version so a crawler can tell at a glance whether the set is current.

The current version is 8.1. It adds llm.json back after crawler logs showed AI crawlers still requesting it, and it adds llms.txt. Both are generated every night from the manifest, so none of the files can disagree with each other. The full specification is published on Digital Karma Web.

In Practice

Every site in this portfolio publishes /ai/manifest.json, /ai/catalog.json and /llm.json. An AI crawler that reads one of them can find the rest, plus the sibling sites in the same industry constellation, without scraping a single page.

Worth Knowing

Publishing the files does not force any AI system to use them. Server logs show which files crawlers request. They do not show whether a crawler used a file, quoted it, or ranked anything because of it.

Related Terms

llm.json

A small JSON file at the root of a website that tells a language model what the site is, what it publishes, and where the rest of its machine-readable files live.

llms.txt

A short markdown file at the root of a website that introduces the site to a language model and links to the pages worth reading first.

Structured Data

Machine-readable markup, like JSON-LD, that states what a page or entity is directly, instead of leaving a search engine or AI system to infer it from prose.

Industry Constellation

A deliberately cross-linked cluster of properties that share an audience and a body of expertise inside one industry, structured so each property is evidence for the others.

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