Chrome’s new Lighthouse Agentic Browsing audit treats your .txt file as a markdown document. If your llms.txt does not use markdown link syntax, you fail the audit, even when every link in the file is accurate and works. I ran the audit on nohacks.co. Two of six audits passed. Three came back not applicable. One failed: the llms.txt audit, with the verbatim error “File does not appear to contain any links.” The fix was five characters per link. The file is still served as plain text. Only the audit result changed.
Lighthouse 13.3.0 shipped the Agentic Browsing category alongside Performance, Accessibility, SEO, and Best Practices. Six audits in the default set: accessibility tree well-formedness (agent-accessibility-tree), cumulative layout shift (cumulative-layout-shift), llms.txt discoverability (llms-txt), and three WebMCP checks (webmcp-registered-tools, webmcp-form-coverage, webmcp-schema-validity). The category returns a fractional pass ratio instead of a 0-to-100 score, because the standards for the agentic web are still in motion.
1 Of 6 Audits Failed On Nohacks.co
I ran the audit via the Lighthouse CLI: npx lighthouse@latest https://nohacks.co --only-categories=agentic-browsing. Six audits returned. Three came back not-applicable, all WebMCP: webmcp-registered-tools, webmcp-form-coverage, and webmcp-schema-validity. Lighthouse gives no reason for a not-applicable result, it just marks the audit and moves on. nohacks.co does expose WebMCP, but only through the experimental imperative navigator.modelContext API (two glossary tools, two for an agentic-browser directory), with no declarative form annotations. The scan ran in a default headless Chrome 150 with no WebMCP flag, so the not-applicable verdict could mean the website exposes nothing these audits recognize, or that the scan environment had no WebMCP API active at the time. Lighthouse does not say which. Two audits passed cleanly: agent-accessibility-tree reported “All audits passed,” confirming the semantic HTML and ARIA structure is well-formed enough for agents to navigate, and cumulative-layout-shift came back at zero.
One audit failed: llms-txt. The verbatim error message from Lighthouse was:
File does not appear to contain any links.
The category score was 0.67. That was the first surprise. The file at nohacks.co/llms.txt has many links. Navigation paths to articles, episodes, guests, the glossary. RSS feed URLs. Audio file URL patterns. The file is over five kilobytes of structured content. So why was Lighthouse reporting zero links?
Lighthouse Parses .txt As Markdown And Rejects Plain-Text Links
The file extension is .txt, but Lighthouse parses the contents as markdown, and demands markdown link syntax for any text to count as a link. The file is named llms.txt. The HTTP server returns it with a text/plain MIME type. Open it in a browser, and you see plain text. But the llms.txt specification at llmstxt.org defines the format as a markdown document. The spec is…
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