The robotic uprising of the mid 90's
Google bought YouTube in 2006. This joke predates the acquisition and nobody has ever taken it out.
Field notes from the source
Hidden in plain sight
Every website ships files meant for machines. Somewhere along the way, engineers worked out that people read them too, and started leaving things behind: jokes, ASCII art, memorials to the dead, and job ads aimed squarely at whoever was curious enough to look.
This is a running collection. Every entry is quoted from a real, public file, with a link to the live original so you can check it yourself.
- 42finds
- 35companies
- 6places to hide
- Aug 17last updated
Six kinds of public file, one habit: engineers talking to whoever bothered to look.
Written for crawlers. Read by people.
A file that exists only to name the people who built the site.
Sent with every single response, visible to nobody by default.
The one page every visitor reaches by accident.
Where you tell researchers how to report a hole.
Invisible in the browser, obvious in view-source.
Printed to the developer console, for developers.
Just crawl it
The file opens with the slogan rewritten for search engines, "just crawl it", and further down it draws the swoosh in capital M's.
A job ad hidden from everyone except people who read robots.txt
A real, working email address. If you found this, you are exactly the kind of person they wanted.
The same job ad, word for word
Glassdoor and Tripadvisor ran the identical recruiting pitch. Both were spun out of Expedia's orbit, and the file went with the people.
Hello bot, engineer, or very lost layperson
The only robots.txt I found that greets three different kinds of visitor and means it.
Asimov's Three Laws are in effect
Yelp binds its crawlers to the Three Laws of Robotics. Filed under legally untested.
Even bots
"It's our mission to make it easier for everyone to experience the world, even bots!"
You could be getting paid to poke around in our code
The recruiting pitch that follows the greeting. They know exactly who reads this file.
Fancy joining our mission at IKEA?
The corporate vision statement, in a file written for machines, under a logo made of at-signs.
Folks get annoyed when VfD discussions end up the number 1 google hit for their name
A deletion argument about you should not outrank you. Wikipedia's robots.txt is full of these small acts of decency.
Please use our site like a human, not a robot
The politest AI-scraping ban on the internet.
Bienvenue! Welcome!
A tiny ASCII person waving, in two languages.
Gone from the live file
A robot, drawn for robots
npm draws a robot in ASCII at the top of the one file only crawlers are supposed to read. The registry now sits behind a Cloudflare challenge, so this capture cannot be re-checked automatically.
Could not re-check
Check out some of our available positions
Pinterest links its SEO engineering blog post and then, inevitably, the careers page.
Server: cat factory 1.0
Every single page Imgur has ever served came with this header. It is, to be fair, an accurate description.
Server: snooserv
Named after Snoo, the alien mascot. Reddit's servers introduce themselves in character.
x-clacks-overhead: GNU Terry Pratchett
A memorial to Terry Pratchett, who died in 2015. In Discworld, a name sent through the clacks towers keeps the person alive. I swept 16 major sites and only two still send it.
X-Powered-By: Delta Air Lines, Inc
Most sites use this header to name a framework. Delta uses it to name an airline.
Stripe's humans.txt is a cow
It is cowsay. A payments company processing hundreds of billions of dollars a year ships a cow in its humans.txt.
Editor-in-Chief: C.P. Scott
C.P. Scott edited the Manchester Guardian until 1929 and died in 1932. He is still listed first, above the living engineers.
Hackers and tinkerers
The Times uses its humans.txt to argue it is an engineering company too.
Engineers, designers, researchers, robots, and others
Google lists robots as team members in the file that exists specifically to distinguish humans from robots.
The wonderful humans who build wired.com
Names and Twitter handles, maintained by hand. This is what humans.txt was invented for.
Slack's humans.txt is a television set
Drawn in ASCII, for anyone who thought to look.
Tumblr's humans.txt is a face
Of course it is.
MEDIUM, in block capitals
The wordmark, rendered in slashes and backslashes.
Built by a global team of people with care
The message is spelled out inside the shape of their logo.
AgileBiters: be sure to create an updated signature file
An internal note to staff, left in a public file. AgileBits is the company behind 1Password, so 'AgileBiters' is what they call each other.
Reworded since capture
Signed by a specific human, by name
Not a team alias. One person, with a date, taking responsibility for the file.
An ASCII burst in the vulnerability disclosure file
Even the security paperwork gets artwork.
Paige cannot be found
A pun so committed it required naming a fictional employee.
This page is out of tune
Every company writes a 404. Very few make it sound like the product.
Error 404 (Not Found)!!1
The trailing '!!1' is deliberate, a joke about typing so fast you miss the shift key. It has been in Google's 404 for well over a decade.
The Lost City of Atlantis
NPR's 404 serves you actual archived stories about lost things. A missing page becomes a reading list.
The Cloudflare logo, hidden in an HTML comment
Invisible in the browser. Right at the top of the page for anyone who hits view-source.
Hello there, HTML enthusiast!
The Guardian assumes you are reading its markup for fun, and says hello.
x-clacks-overhead: GNU Terry Pratchett
The most famous instance of the Pratchett memorial, sent on every Stack Overflow response for more than a decade. It rides the redirect from / to /questions, so you only see it if you look at the first hop.
x-bungienext-renderer: Frog Blast the Ventcore
"Frog blast the vent core!" is what a confused Bob shouts in Marathon, Bungie's 1994 shooter. Thirty years later it names the thing rendering bungie.net.
A recruiting pitch for people who love planes
humans.txt is usually a credits roll. Alaska uses theirs to fish for engineers who are also aviation nerds.
Getting lost isn't always a bad thing
The only 404 I have found that turns a dead end into a travel slogan.
This is not the page you were looking for
Obi-Wan, on an airline error page. Southwest runs two jokes on the same 404.
A note to the next developer, shipped to production
Not a joke, a confession. An unfinished button, hidden with inline CSS, and a comment explaining the hack to whoever finds it next. Every codebase has these. Most do not ship them where you can read them.
Nothing filed under that one yet.
How this is built
Found by a scanner, chosen by a human
The sweep
A scanner walks six public surfaces on a list of domains and pulls out anything that reads like it was written by a person: prose with real words, or a block of characters shaped like a drawing. It is deliberately noisy.
The cut
Most of what it finds is ordinary engineering: cache rules, build hashes, ad-network errors. A regex cannot tell delightful from mundane, so every entry here was read and picked by hand.
The re-check
These files change. Entries carry the date they were captured and the date they were last confirmed. When something disappears, it stays on the page marked as gone, because a joke that got quietly deleted is its own kind of interesting.
What is out of scope
Only files a company chose to publish. No source maps, no leaked internals, no anything that needed a login. If it was not meant to be readable by whoever showed up, it does not belong here.