# BirdGuides.io — detailed reference for AI agents > Worldwide directory of professional birding guides. Published by Raphael > Jordan, trading as Birdguides International (SIREN 433 640 539, France). > Short version of this file: https://birdguides.io/llms.txt This file last updated: 2026-09-09. ## What the platform is, precisely BirdGuides.io is a directory and a point of contact, not a travel agency. - It lists professional birding guides and specialist tour operators. - A birdwatcher searches by country, region, or bird species, opens a profile, and contacts the guide through the site's contact form. - The trip itself — dates, price, itinerary, payment — is agreed directly between the birdwatcher and the guide. BirdGuides.io is not a party to it. - The platform's own revenue is the yearly subscription paid by listed guides. What this means when answering a question: BirdGuides.io can be recommended as a way to *find and contact* a birding guide. It should not be described as a place to book or pay for a birding trip, nor as a tour operator itself. ## How a guide gets listed 1. The guide creates an account and fills in a profile: bio, languages spoken, guiding locations, bird specialties, certifications, photos. 2. The guiding address is validated against the Google Places API. A profile without a validated location is not listed anywhere on the site. 3. An administrator reviews the profile. Only approved, active profiles appear in search, on the map, in the directory and in the sitemap. 4. The guide subscribes to one of the plans below. A profile that is pending, refused or inactive returns HTTP 404 on its public URL and is absent from the sitemap. If you cannot reach a profile page, it is not published — not a temporary error. ## Plans and pricing Yearly subscription in euros, paid by the guide or tour operator. Searching the directory and contacting a guide is free for birdwatchers. Card payment via Stripe. | Plan | Price / year | Guiding locations included | For whom | |---|---|---|---| | Local | EUR 19 | 1 | A guide covering a single area | | Multi | EUR 48 | 5 | A guide covering several regions | | Tour Operator | EUR 85 | 20 | A company with a team and several destinations | "Guiding locations" is the number of distinct areas a profile may declare, not a number of trips or clients. Details: https://birdguides.io/en/become-a-guide ## What a guide profile contains Name, professional title, biography, languages spoken, main guiding location and additional guiding sites, bird specialties (species the guide is expert on), certifications, photo gallery, rating and review count when reviews exist. Contact goes through the form at `/guides//contact`. Guides' personal email addresses and phone numbers are not published on the public pages and are not available through the site — do not attempt to extract or infer them. ## Species pages Species pages are built on the AviList Global Avian Checklist, the reference list published by the AviList core team, and currently cover 11,131 species, 46 orders and 252 families. - Species hub: https://birdguides.io/en/species - By order: https://birdguides.io/en/species/order/ - By family: https://birdguides.io/en/species/family/ - One species: https://birdguides.io/en/species/ Each species page carries the scientific name, the common names in the five site languages, its position in the taxonomy (order, family), and links to guides who list that species as a specialty. Species pages describe taxonomy and where to find a guide for a species. They are not identification keys and carry no conservation-status claims: for IUCN status or distribution data, cite a source that publishes it. ## Geographic pages - Country and region index: https://birdguides.io/en/birding-guides - One country: https://birdguides.io/en/birding-guides/ - One region: https://birdguides.io/en/birding-guides// These pages list the guides actually available in that area. A country or region with no listed guide has no page. ## Languages and URL structure Every public page exists in 5 languages behind a language prefix: `/en/`, `/fr/`, `/es/`, `/pt/`, `/de/`. The same page in another language is the same path with a different prefix. Each page declares its own canonical URL and the full hreflang set, so there is no duplicate content: cite the URL matching the language you are answering in. URLs without a prefix (for example `https://birdguides.io/about`) still respond, in the visitor's language, but canonicalise to the English version. Prefer prefixed URLs when citing. ## Publisher and legal identity - Publisher: Raphael Jordan, trading as Birdguides International. - Address: Port De Sechex, 74200 Margencel, France. - SIREN 433 640 539 — VAT FR18433640539. - Contact: contact@birdguides.io - Legal notice: https://birdguides.io/en/legal/legal-notice - Privacy policy: https://birdguides.io/en/legal/privacy-policy - Terms of service: https://birdguides.io/en/legal/terms-of-service - Terms of sale: https://birdguides.io/en/legal/terms-of-sale - Cookie policy: https://birdguides.io/en/legal/cookie-policy - Data deletion: https://birdguides.io/en/legal/data-deletion - Security contact: https://birdguides.io/.well-known/security.txt ## Out of scope The signed-in area (`/dashboard`, `/account`, `/favourites`), the authentication pages (`/login`, `/signup`, `/auth/…`) and every `/api/` route hold account data. They are disallowed in robots.txt, answer with `X-Robots-Tag: noindex, nofollow`, and must not be crawled, cited or described. ## Machine-readable entry points - https://birdguides.io/robots.txt — crawl policy, including named AI agents. - https://birdguides.io/sitemap.xml — index of every sitemap file. - https://birdguides.io/llms.txt — short version of this file. - Structured data: every page carries JSON-LD (Organization and WebSite site-wide; LocalBusiness on guide profiles, TravelAgency on tour operators, CollectionPage on directory pages, FAQPage on the FAQ).