Feeds and Machine-Readable Formats
Besides the web pages readers see, every HelpGuides site publishes its content in formats that feed readers, search engines, AI tools and your own code can use. There's nothing to turn on: these URLs work on your site as soon as you publish.
In the examples below, replace docs.example.com with your own domain. Only published content is included.
| URL | Format | Use it for |
|---|---|---|
/feed | RSS 2.0 | Feed readers, email newsletters, automations |
/site.json | JSON Feed | Listing your posts in your own website or app |
/sitemap.xml | XML sitemap | Search engines |
/robots.txt | Text | Telling crawlers what they may index |
/llms.txt, /llms-full.txt | Markdown | AI tools and large language models |
{article}.md | Markdown | One article as Markdown |
{article}.html | HTML | One article's content without your site's header, menu or footer |
/openapi.json | OpenAPI | Describing the public API to AI platforms and developer tools |
RSS feed
Your RSS feed lists your published articles, newest first:
Each item has the article's title, link, ID, meta description, publish date and last updated date. If the article has a featured image, it's included as a Media RSS image, which most feed readers display. Every page on your site links to the feed, so feed readers can find it automatically.
| Parameter | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|
page | 1 | Which page of results to return |
pageSize | 25 | Articles per page, from 1 to 100 |
categoryuid | None | Only include articles in this category |
The feed is paged, so it doesn't return every article at once. It includes self, first, prev, next and last links that feed readers use to page through it. A category's ID is the last part of its page URL, /category/{id}.
JSON feed (site.json)
/site.json returns your published articles as a JSON Feed, newest first. It's the easiest way to show a list of your latest articles or posts on another website.
| Parameter | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|
page | 1 | Which page of results to return |
pageSize | 12 | Articles per page, from 1 to 50 |
categoryuid | None | Only include articles in this category |
authoruid | None | Only include articles by this author |
The feed's title and description come from your project's Title and Welcome Message in Settings. thumbnail_url is left out for articles without a featured image. Responses are cached for up to 5 minutes.
Markdown and plain HTML versions of an article
Add .md or .html to the end of any article's URL:
.mdreturns the article as Markdown, which uses far fewer tokens than HTML when you give it to an AI model. See Viewing in Markdown..htmlreturns only the article's title and content as HTML, without your site's header, navigation, footer, scripts or styles. Use it to embed or import an article elsewhere.
Both work for published and unlisted articles. Other articles show the 404 page.
llms.txt and llms-full.txt
/llms.txt is a short index of your site for AI tools, listing your highlighted articles with their descriptions. /llms-full.txt contains the full text of every published article in Markdown, in one file. It's rebuilt at most every 3 hours. See Using LLMS.txt.
robots.txt
HelpGuides generates /robots.txt from your Allow Search Engine Indexing setting in Settings → General. When indexing is allowed, it looks like this:
The Markdown versions and llms-full.txt are disallowed so search engines don't index the same content twice. When indexing is turned off, every page is disallowed:
robots.txt is cached for up to 3 hours, so a change to the setting can take that long to appear. See Finding Broken Links with the SEO Report for the indexing settings and Site Map for sitemap.xml.
Public API
Your site also answers these read-only JSON endpoints. They need no API key and power your site's own search and navigation.
| Endpoint | Returns |
|---|---|
GET /api/v1/public/search?s={query} | Up to 10 search results. Add &article_only=true to return one result per article |
GET /api/v1/public/search/stream?s={query} | The same search as a stream of server-sent events, including an AI-generated answer for questions |
GET /api/v1/public/menu | Your category and article tree, published articles only |
GET /api/v1/public/posts/recent?count={n} | The most recently published articles. count is 1 to 20, default 5 |
GET /api/v1/public/post/{postuid}/related | Up to 3 related articles |
GET /api/v1/public/post/{postuid} | One article, including its HTML |
/openapi.json describes these endpoints. See Exposing Your APIs with openapi.json. To create, update or publish content from your own code, use the authenticated API with an API key from Settings → API Keys, or connect an AI assistant with Model Context Protocol.