Phoenix llms.txt Maintenance

docs/phoenix/llms.txt is the machine-readable documentation index for Phoenix, following the llmstxt.org specification. AI agents, coding assistants, and the px docs fetch CLI all consume this file.

Format

Standard markdown links per the llmstxt.org spec:

- [Title](https://arize.com/docs/phoenix/path/to/page): Action-oriented description of what the page teaches

Sections use ## headings, subsections use ###. Subsections inherit their parent section.

Coverage rules

Default to including every published .mdx page that exists in docs.json navigation. The AFDocs Agent Score (afdocs.dev) measures llms.txt coverage against the sitemap and flags anything under 80%. Aim for ≥ 90% coverage of nav-published pages.

Include as individual entries:

• All workflow docs (tracing, evaluation, experiments, prompts)
• SDK and API reference pages, including each REST API endpoint
• Self-hosting and deployment guides
• Quick start guides (Python and TypeScript)
• Server-side evaluation pages
• Pre-built evaluation metrics — list each metric page (faithfulness, toxicity, hallucination, RAG relevance, etc.) so agents can find them by name
• Evaluation integrations — list each provider's evals page (Ragas, Cleanlab, UQLM, MLflow, OpenAI evals, Anthropic evals, etc.); these are real docs pages with usable code
• Release notes — list each individual release note. Group by year under a ## Release Notes section with ### YYYY subsections so the section stays scannable
• Cookbook pages with substantial prose content (code samples, written explanation, configuration walkthroughs)

Include as individual entries under Integrations:

• All LLM provider pages (OpenAI, Anthropic, Bedrock, Google GenAI, etc.) and their tracing/evals sub-pages
• All framework integration pages (LangChain, LlamaIndex, Vercel AI SDK, etc.) and their tracing sub-pages
• All platform integration pages (Dify, Flowise, LangFlow, etc.)
• Developer tools (Coding Agents, MCP Server)
• Vector databases (each provider page)

Exclude — content agents cannot use:

• Agent-assisted setup page — for AI coding agents, not human developers or LLM documentation consumers
• Interactive demos and sandbox links (e.g., Phoenix Demo) — agents cannot interact with live demos
• Colab / Jupyter notebook links (e.g., End-to-End Features Notebook) — agents cannot parse .ipynb hosted on Colab
• Cookbook pages that are only a Colab embed with no prose
• Bare external links that have no docs page behind them (e.g., a raw github.com URL). Note: docs about GitHub (issues, contributing) are fine to keep
• Translated pages (documentation/jp.mdx, zh.mdx)
• Draft or temporary pages
• Orphan .mdx files not in docs.json navigation — these aren't routed by Mintlify and 404 in production
• Duplicate entries — if a page already appears in one section, do not repeat it in another (e.g., don't list "User Guide" in both Overview and Concepts)

Always include:

• The OpenAPI spec URL (https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Arize-ai/phoenix/refs/heads/main/schemas/openapi.json) in the SDK & API Reference section — this is the most machine-readable resource in the entire docs and critical for agents building API integrations

Auditing coverage

Every time you add, remove, or audit llms.txt entries you must traverse the full docs tree to verify coverage. Follow these steps in order:

Step 1 — Enumerate published nav pages (intersect docs.json with .mdx files)

docs.json is the source of truth for what Mintlify routes. Pages on disk but not in nav 404 in production. Pages in nav with no .mdx file are broken nav entries. Use the intersection.

# All nav-published page paths
python3 -c "
import re, json
raw = open('docs.json').read()
nav = sorted({p.replace('docs/phoenix/','') for p in re.findall(r'\"(docs/phoenix/[a-zA-Z0-9/_-]+)\"', raw)})
print('\n'.join(f'https://arize.com/docs/phoenix/{p}' for p in nav))
" | sort > /tmp/nav_urls.txt

# All .mdx files on disk
find docs/phoenix -name "*.mdx" -type f | \
  sed 's|docs/phoenix/||; s|\.mdx$||; s|^|https://arize.com/docs/phoenix/|' | \
  sort > /tmp/fs_urls.txt

# Use the intersection — these are the URLs that actually serve content
comm -12 /tmp/nav_urls.txt /tmp/fs_urls.txt > /tmp/published_urls.txt

Step 2 — Extract current llms.txt URLs

grep -oE '\(https://[^)]+\)' docs/phoenix/llms.txt | \
  tr -d '()' | sort > /tmp/llms_urls.txt

Step 3 — Diff for missing and stale entries

# Pages published but NOT in llms.txt (gaps to fill)
comm -23 /tmp/published_urls.txt /tmp/llms_urls.txt > /tmp/missing.txt

# URLs in llms.txt but NOT published (stale — remove)
comm -13 /tmp/published_urls.txt /tmp/llms_urls.txt > /tmp/stale.txt

Step 4 — Triage each result

For every entry in /tmp/missing.txt, open the .mdx file and decide:

• Include — default, unless the page matches an exclusion rule (notebook-only, demo, translated, agent-assisted-setup)
• Skip — only when an exclusion rule applies

For every entry in /tmp/stale.txt:

• Check if the URL is a non-filesystem resource that is still valid (e.g., the OpenAPI spec, external TypeScript SDK docs). These are expected "stale" results — keep them.
• If the .mdx file was deleted or renamed, remove the entry.

Step 5 — Verify coverage % against the AFDocs threshold

published=$(wc -l < /tmp/published_urls.txt)
indexed=$(comm -12 /tmp/published_urls.txt /tmp/llms_urls.txt | wc -l)
echo "scale=1; $indexed * 100 / $published" | bc
# Target: ≥ 90 (AFDocs flags < 80)

Step 5 — Spot-check by section

Walk each ## section in llms.txt and verify:

1. The section has entries for all major sub-topics in docs/phoenix/<section>/
2. No entry is duplicated in another section
3. Descriptions are action-oriented and 10–25 words (see "Writing good descriptions")

Some false positives are expected — directory URLs that resolve via the docs framework's routing are valid even without a corresponding .mdx file.

Section order

1. Overview — what Phoenix is
2. Quick Start — getting-started guides
3. Tracing — capturing execution data
4. Evaluation — measuring quality
5. Datasets & Experiments — systematic testing
6. Prompt Engineering — prompt management and playground
7. Integrations — frameworks, providers, platforms (grouped by type)
8. Settings — RBAC, API keys, data retention
9. Concepts — theoretical foundations
10. Resources — FAQs, contribution guide, migration
11. SDK & API Reference — Python, TypeScript, REST, OpenInference
12. Self-Hosting — deployment and configuration
13. Phoenix Cloud — managed service
14. Cookbooks — example notebooks

Writing good titles

Titles are the primary signal an LLM uses to decide whether to fetch a page.

• Be specific — titles must be unambiguous when read outside their section context. "Overview" or "Tutorial" alone is meaningless; prefer "Server Evals Overview" or "Tracing Tutorial".
• No duplicate titles — every [Title] in the file must be unique. If two pages would both be called "Overview", prefix with the topic.

Writing good descriptions

Descriptions help LLMs decide whether to fetch a page. They should:

• Be action-oriented — state what the page teaches you to do, not what it's about. Use imperative verbs: "Configure…", "Instrument…", "Run…", "Build…". Never use noun-only lists like "Latency, token usage, cost" — instead write "Monitor latency, token usage, and cost across traces".
• Differentiate from the title — the description must add information the title does not already convey. If the description just restates the title in different words, it wastes tokens and helps no one. Bad: title "Auto-Optimize", description "Automated prompt optimization". Good: title "Auto-Optimize", description "Use DSPy-style optimizers to improve prompts programmatically".
• Mention package names for integration/SDK pages — e.g., "openinference-instrumentation-openai", "@arizeai/phoenix-client".
• Be 5–20 words — shorter is better. Cut every word that doesn't help an LLM decide whether to fetch.
• No filler — never use "comprehensive", "complete", "learn more about", "information about", "overview of". These words carry zero signal.
• SDK reference entries must describe what the package does, not just repeat the package name. Bad: "@arizeai/phoenix-evals". Good: "Run LLM and code evaluators in TypeScript".

Verification

After changes, run the CLI parser tests to confirm the file is well-formed:

cd js/packages/phoenix-cli && pnpm test -- --grep "docs"