Vercel: vendor profile

In short

Vercel's documentation answers Accept: */* with markdown and sends HTML only when the client names text/html. The firewall's AI Bots ruleset is free on every plan but opt-in, and since 2026-10-29 it separates training crawlers from assistants. Vercel announced on 2025-07-08 that NuxtLabs was joining. Hobby is free, and Pro is $20 a month plus usage.

At a glance

standards.txt vercel

llms-txt               = partial
markdown-negotiation   = partial
markdown-twin          = partial
initial-html           = partial
real-404               = no statement
vary-accept            = supports

1 supports, 4 partial or announced, 1 no statement.

Vercel Host, CDN or edge product

Cloud host and CDN behind Next.js. Its own docs answer Accept: text/markdown and .md URLs with Vary: Accept, and its firewall has a free AI Bots ruleset that can block training crawlers while letting assistant fetches through.

Type: Host, CDN or edge product
Home page: vercel.com, answered HTTP 200 on 2026-11-05
Last read: 5 November 2026

What it does for this layer

Vercel's pricing page on 2026-11-05 listed Hobby at $0 a month, Pro at $20 a month and Enterprise at a custom price, with Pro usage beyond its included edge requests and data transfer billed per unit. [primary source, 2026-11-05] source, read 5 November 2026.
A Vercel changelog entry dated 2026-01-13 made the Vercel documentation answer Accept: text/markdown with Markdown, each response ending in a link to sitemap.md so agents can find further pages. [primary source, 2026-01-13] source, read 5 November 2026.
Vercel's docs return Markdown on the canonical URL to clients that prefer it and also to a recognised AI agent that states no format preference, while an agent that asks for text/html still gets HTML. [primary source] source, read 5 November 2026.
Every Vercel docs page also has a .md URL, advertised from the HTML through a rel=alternate link of type text/markdown, and each Markdown copy opens with YAML frontmatter carrying title, canonical_url, last_updated, type, prerequisites and a one-sentence summary. [primary source] source, read 5 November 2026.
Vercel's CDN puts the Accept header into its cache key for the docs, so HTML and Markdown copies of one URL are stored apart at the edge as well as in downstream caches. [primary source] source, read 5 November 2026.
Beyond llms.txt (also served as /agent.txt), Vercel publishes /docs/graph.json, a link graph rebuilt nightly across its docs, Knowledge Base, nextjs.org and ai-sdk.dev, plus /.well-known/ai-catalog.json and an RFC 9727 /.well-known/api-catalog. [primary source] source, read 5 November 2026.
On 2025-05-13 Vercel added a one-toggle AI bot managed ruleset to its firewall, free on all plans and kept up to date by Vercel, that blocks GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Bytespider and similar crawlers. [primary source, 2025-05-13] source, read 5 November 2026.
Since 2026-10-29 the AI Bots ruleset in Vercel Firewall splits AI crawlers, which collect content for indexing and training, from AI assistants, which fetch pages for a user's request, so a project can deny the first group and only log the second. [primary source, 2026-10-29] source, read 5 November 2026.
Vercel's Knowledge Base guide on agentic commerce, published 2026-10-01, ranks an llms.txt file below Schema.org Product JSON-LD, Open Graph tags and a product feed for getting a catalogue read by AI agents. [primary source, 2026-10-01] source, read 5 November 2026.
The same Vercel guide reports that in December 2024 GPTBot made 569 million requests across Vercel's network and Anthropic's Claude crawlers 370 million, crawlers that fetch HTML without executing it. [primary source] source, read 5 November 2026.
For multi-tenant Next.js platforms, Vercel's docs show route handlers that build robots.txt, sitemap.xml and llms.txt per tenant at request time rather than as one shared static file. [primary source] source, read 5 November 2026.
Vercel announced on 2025-07-08 that NuxtLabs, the stewards of Nuxt and Nitro, were joining the company, which puts the maintainers of a second framework under the same roof as the Next.js team. [primary source, 2025-07-08] source, read 5 November 2026.
On 2026-11-05 vercel.com/docs/functions sent 12,225 bytes of text/markdown to a curl request with Accept: */* and 976,893 bytes of HTML to Accept: text/html; vercel.com/docs/llms-full.txt was 11,995,638 bytes, and a made-up top-level path redirected twice to the login page when the request asked for text/html, instead of returning 404, while the same path with no Accept header returned 404. [observed, 2026-11-05] source, read 5 November 2026.

Products and plans

Plans and prices as the vendor's own pages showed them on the date read.
Product	What it is	Price	As of	Source
Vercel platform	Hosting, CDN and functions for Next.js and other frameworks, with preview and production deployments.	Free tier, paid plans above it Hobby $0/mo; Pro $20/mo plus usage; Enterprise custom	2026-11-05	source
Vercel Firewall AI Bots ruleset	Managed firewall rule that logs or blocks AI crawlers and, since October 2026, AI assistants as a separate category.	Free free on all plans	2026-11-05	source
BotID	Bot detection for protected routes, with basic checks on every plan and paid Deep Analysis.	Usage-based, with a free allowance basic checks included; Deep Analysis $1 per 1,000 checks on Pro	2026-11-05	source

Standards

The six standards this site tracks; no statement means the pages read said nothing.
Standard	Status	What the vendor's pages say	Source
llms-txt	partial	No automatic file for customer projects; docs show route handlers that serve llms.txt per tenant.	source
markdown-negotiation	partial	Vercel's own docs negotiate on Accept; customer sites need their own rewrite and route handler.	source
markdown-twin	partial	Vercel docs pages have .md URLs; there is no platform switch that adds them to customer sites.	source
initial-html	partial	Serves what the framework builds; Vercel's commerce guide tells sites to server-render the catalogue into the first response.	source
real-404	no statement	No host-level 404 statement found in the docs index searched; on vercel.com itself /docs paths 404 while a made-up top-level path redirects to login for a request that asks for text/html and returns 404 otherwise.	none
vary-accept	supports	Every Markdown response from the docs sets Vary: Accept and the CDN keys its cache on Accept.	source

Checks on its own site

Readings of vercel.com, the vendor's own website, which describe that site and not the product.
Reading	Result	Date
Home page request	HTTP 200; H1 in the initial HTML: yes; 155 words; 6 JSON-LD blocks	2026-11-05
Request with Accept: text/markdown	HTTP 200, text/markdown, Vary: Accept	2026-11-05
/llms.txt at the host root	HTTP 200, text/plain, 5.3 KB, starts with an H1	2026-11-05
A made-up path	HTTP 404	2026-11-05
Ora score, cached	91, grade A	2026-11-05
Cloudflare keyless scan	60, L1 Basic Web Presence	2026-11-05
Shared crawl row	Tranco rank 3,040; home page HTTP 200; H1 in the HTML: yes; 546 words; JSON-LD types: Organization, Service, SoftwareApplication; answers markdown: yes; made-up path HTTP 200; llms.txt valid: yes	2026-11-04

What it does not do

Vercel has no project setting that turns on markdown or .md URLs for a customer site; the negotiation on vercel.com/docs is Vercel's own code, which customers reproduce with rewrites and route handlers.
The AI Bots ruleset is opt-in, so Vercel does not block GPTBot or ClaudeBot on a project until its owner enables AI Bots under Bot Management.

Ora

Vercel sits on the AgentReady committee for infrastructure and web essentials, and Ora built is-agentic.com with Vercel. Ora's launch post, read 5 November 2026.

Related pages on this site

Sources

Vercel: home page https://vercel.com/, read 5 November 2026
Vercel pricing https://vercel.com/pricing, read 5 November 2026
Docs pages support Markdown responses https://vercel.com/changelog/docs-pages-support-markdown-responses, read 5 November 2026
Markdown and Agent Discovery https://vercel.com/docs/agent-resources/markdown-access, read 5 November 2026
New one-click AI bot managed ruleset https://vercel.com/changelog/new-one-click-ai-bot-managed-ruleset, read 5 November 2026
Control AI crawlers and assistants separately in Vercel Firewall https://vercel.com/changelog/block-ai-crawlers-and-assistants-independently-with-managed-rules, read 5 November 2026
Making your catalog discoverable to AI agents https://vercel.com/kb/guide/agentic-commerce-readiness, read 5 November 2026
Serving Static Files (multi-tenant) https://vercel.com/docs/platforms/multi-tenant-platforms/serving-static-files, read 5 November 2026
NuxtLabs joins Vercel https://vercel.com/blog/nuxtlabs-joins-vercel, read 5 November 2026
vercel.com docs negotiation and 404 checks (observed) https://vercel.com/docs/functions, read 5 November 2026
Ora: AgentReady launch post https://ora.ai/blog/agentready-launch, read 5 November 2026

Last reviewed 5 November 2026