The following option in the Publish screen generates additional copies of your topics and other key files in the Markdown format to make them more accessible to AI crawlers on the web.
See Hybrid HTML5/Markdown Export for full details of how this export format is implemented.
Why would you want to use this?
If you want AI systems like Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini to be aware of your documentation you can publish your WebHelp documentation in this hybrid format to make the information more easily accessible to these systems' AI crawlers on the web.
Regular WebHelp HTML files include a lot of additional structuring and formatting code to make them accessible to human users. However, all this makes it more difficult for AI systems to ingest the information. Plain text Markdown files remove everything that the AI systems don't need, and the structure generated by Help+Manual directs the AI crawlers directly to the files they need, while still making the regular HTML files available to the normal search engine crawlers.
You can replace the included robots.txt file with your own
When you publish the hybrid HTML/Markdown version of WebHelp for AI system accessibility, Help+Manual generates a special robots.txt file in your WebHelp folder that helps to direct search engines and AI system crawlers to the correct files. This is a generic file that covers the main search engine and AI crawlers, and most of the others will read these as well and use them as their cues.
If you wish, you can replace this with your own version. To do this, save it in a plain text file called robots.txt and add this file to the Baggage Files section of the skin you are using to generate your WebHelp. It will then overwrite the version generated by Help+Manual when you publish your WebHelp with that skin,.
