What Is llms.txt and Should You Add It to Your Site?

Short answer: llms.txt is a plain text file placed at the root of your site that summarises your most important pages for AI tools. It's a proposed standard, not an official one. As far as we know, there is currently no clear statement that the major AI companies actively use this file when searching or generating answers.

It takes about an hour to prepare and does no harm. But don't expect it to change your visibility on its own.

What does llms.txt contain?

The idea was put forward in 2024 by Jeremy Howard of Answer.AI. The reasoning: a web page is full of menus, ads, cookie banners and code. Within an AI model's limited context window, finding the actual information gets harder. llms.txt replaces that clutter with a clean summary that says 'this is what matters on my site'.

The file is written in Markdown, and its proposed structure is:

• On the first line, the site or business name preceded by a # sign
• A short one or two sentence summary preceded by a > sign
• A few optional paragraphs of description
• Section headings preceded by ##, each followed by links to important pages with one-line descriptions
• A section named Optional for secondary content that can be skipped

Some sites also publish a version called llms-full.txt that puts all their content into one file. That mainly makes sense for sites with long software documentation.

Which AI tools take it into account?

The honest answer: it's unclear. At the time of writing, Google representatives had said they don't use llms.txt for search or AI Overviews. As far as we know, other AI companies haven't made any official commitment that their search bots read the file either. This may change; check the companies' own documentation for current information.

Where the file is most useful today is software documentation and developer tools. Some coding assistants and documentation platforms use llms.txt or generate it automatically. For a business website, its effect isn't measurable yet.

So why is it still talked about? Because the cost is very low, and if the standard is adopted, early adopters will be ready. It's a bet, but a cheap one.

How it differs from robots.txt

The two files are often confused, yet their functions are completely different.

robots.txt is a permissions file. It says which bot can access which part of the site, and it's a long-established standard. Major search engines and AI crawlers state that they follow its rules; still, robots.txt is an instruction, not a technical barrier.

llms.txt is a guide. It doesn't allow or block anything. If you want to limit AI reading your content or using it for training, the right place is robots.txt, not llms.txt.

It also differs from a sitemap. A sitemap lists every address on the site; llms.txt presents a selected few important pages with descriptions. We explained how robots.txt and sitemaps work in a separate article.

An example file and how to publish it

For a hypothetical hair salon in Kadıköy, the file would look roughly like this:

• First line: # Salon Name
• Summary line: > Hair salon in Kadıköy offering women's and men's cuts, colouring and keratin treatments. By appointment; open Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00 to 20:00.
• Services section: one line per service page. The page name in square brackets, its full address in round brackets next to it, then a colon and a one-sentence description, such as 'Haircut prices and durations'.
• Contact section: address, phone and a link to the booking page.

Publishing is simple. Save the file as llms.txt in UTF-8 plain text at the root of your site, and check that it opens in a browser at yourdomain.com/llms.txt. If you use WordPress, some SEO plugins can generate the file automatically. On custom-coded sites it's usually a short job for the developer.

The most common mistake is writing the file once and forgetting it. When your services, prices or opening hours change, llms.txt should be updated too. Otherwise you'll have carefully summarised outdated information for AI.

For a small business the order should be: first clear service pages, consistent business information, structured data and a Google Business Profile. llms.txt comes after those, as a low-priority but harmless extra. We listed the basic steps for becoming visible in AI search in a separate article.