Create and manage AI agent instructions

Give your AI agents skills and rules to help keep them on-brand and on-policy.

Instructions help guide AI agents by giving them context about your design system, your voice and tone, your CMS, and your legal terms. They come in two types — skills and rules — and they're stored with your site, so AI tools connected through the MCP (Model Context Protocol) server can reference them.

Understand skills and rules

Skills and rules are both agent instructions, but each works a little differently:

• Skills are freeform guidance that describes how to work — your writing style, how to use your design system, or the approach you'd want an agent to take for a particular kind of task. An agent should reference the skill when it's relevant to your request, or when you point it to one directly.
• Rules are short, fixed criteria that apply to every action an agent takes in your site. Use them for the non-negotiables that should hold true no matter what an agent is working on.

Both skills and rules are stored with your site, so they stay available between sessions and the agents working in your site can use them.

Reference your design system and content

Inside a skill or rule, you can insert references to the resources you've already built in Webflow. In the editor, open the reference menu from the toolbar, choose a type, then the specific resource. Webflow inserts a reference token and resolves it when an agent reads the instruction — so the agent works with your current details instead of a copy that can drift out of date.

You can reference design-system resources like variables, style selectors, components, assets, and interactions; content like pages, CMS items, and locales; and even other skills and rules.

This is what lets an instruction say something like "use our brand colors and heading styles" and have an agent apply the actual values from your design system.

Import and export instructions

You can import instructions to Webflow. Files must be in .zip format and only .md and .mdc files are imported. Skills and rules can be inside a folder or at the zip root. We recommend structuring your zip file like this:

instructions.zip
├── skills/
│   └── skill-name/
│       ├── SKILL.md
│       └── references/
├── skill-name/
│   └── SKILL.md
├── rules/
│   └── rule.md
└── rule.mdc

To import instructions:

1. Open the Instructions panel from the left toolbar
2. Click the "import instructions" icon at the top of the panel
3. Drag and drop or click to select your zip file
4. Click Import
5. Review the imported files
6. Click Done

Export instructions

To export all instructions from Webflow:

1. Open the Instructions panel from the left toolbar
2. Click the "export instructions" icon at the top of the panel

You can also export individual instructions by hovering over the instruction, clicking the "more actions" icon, and choosing Download.

Create and manage instructions in Webflow

You can create, view, edit, and delete skills and rules from the Instructions panel in the left toolbar. The panel has a Skills section and a Rules section, and you create either one the same way:

1. Open the Instructions panel from the left toolbar
2. Click the + in the Skills or Rules section
3. Choose Create manually
4. Give your instruction a name in the Settings panel
5. Add a description so your team and AI agents understand what the instruction is for
6. Write your guidance in the editor
7. (Optional) Insert references to your design system, content, and other instructions where you want an agent to use them

In the editor, you can use the formatting toolbar instead of writing Markdown, or switch to code view to edit the Markdown directly.

To edit a skill or rule's guidance later, open it from the Instructions panel and make your changes in the editor. A skill is a folder containing a main SKILL.md file, and you can add more files to it — like images or extra Markdown — for an agent to draw on.

Hover over a skill or rule and click the "more actions" icon to:

• Edit skill settings or Edit rule settings — update its name and description
• Edit with AIA (AI Assistant) — make changes using AI
• Download — save as a zip file to your device
• Rename — give it a new name
• Delete — remove it from your site

Create and manage instructions through the Webflow MCP server

You can also work with instructions through the Webflow MCP server, so a connected AI tool can read, create, update, and delete your skills and rules directly. For example, ask your agent, "list the agent instructions in my [site name] site" — it returns the skills and rules for that site.

Learn how to connect your AI tool to the Webflow MCP server.

Use your instructions

Your instructions can be used by the Webflow AI Assistant and third-party AI tools connected through the MCP server. Agents should always read your rules before taking any action in your site, and reference skills when they're relevant to your request.

You can also point an agent to a specific skill. When you want it to reference one, name it in your request — for example, "Use the [skill name] skill to draft this page."

Share instructions across your sites

Agent instructions are a Shared Library resource, like components and variables. When you add instructions to a Shared Library, you can install them on the other sites in your Workspace and push updates from one place — so a brand lead can keep a single set of instructions and roll it out everywhere it's needed.

Roles and permissions

Who can read and manage agent instructions depends on a teammate's site role:

• Site managers and Designers can read and manage instructions — creating, editing, and deleting them
• Marketers and Content editors can read instructions, but can't change them

Reviewers can't read instructions, and access can't currently be changed for custom roles.

Learn more

• Webflow MCP server overview
• Webflow AI overview