What Is Llms.Txt, And Should Your Site Have One?
A plain text file that tells AI assistants what your business is. It is not a standard, it will not make a model recommend you, and it takes twenty minutes. Here is the honest case for it.
If you have read anything about getting found in AI search this year, llms.txt has probably come up. Usually with more certainty than the situation deserves.
Here is what it actually is, what it does not do, and whether it is worth your afternoon.
What it is
A plain text file at the root of your site — yoursite.com/llms.txt — that describes your business for an AI assistant reading it. Markdown, human-readable, no special syntax to learn.
The idea borrows from robots.txt. Where robots.txt tells a crawler what it may read, llms.txt tells a model what matters and how to describe you. Your services, your locations, your contact details, links to the pages worth reading, in the order you would want them read.
What it is not
It is not a standard. It is a convention some people have adopted. No search engine has committed to reading it, and no assistant guarantees it is used.
It will not make a model recommend you. Nothing will. Anyone selling that is selling something they cannot deliver.
It is not a substitute for the site itself. If your content only exists after JavaScript runs, or your robots.txt blocks GPTBot, llms.txt fixes neither — and those two matter far more.
The honest case for it
It costs twenty minutes and it is the one place where you choose the exact wording a model reads about you.
Everywhere else, an engine infers what you do from marketing copy written to persuade humans. Your homepage says you are passionate about transforming businesses. A model trying to answer "who builds Shopify stores in Dubai" has to work out whether that is you.
llms.txt lets you just say it. Plainly, in the order you choose, with the contact details attached.
The asymmetry is what makes it worth doing. If the convention takes hold, you were early at almost no cost. If it does not, you spent twenty minutes on a file nobody read. That is a good bet, and it is a different argument from the one usually made for it.
What to put in it
- Your business name, what you do, and where — in the first two lines, because that is what gets read if anything does
- Services, each with a one-line description and a link
- Locations and the areas you serve
- Contact details, written out rather than linked
- Key pages: pricing, case studies, the things you would want quoted
Write it the way you would explain your business to someone in a lift. No adjectives, no positioning statements. A model has no use for "industry-leading" and neither does a reader.
Keep it current
The failure mode is not writing it, it is forgetting it. A file listing services you dropped and a phone number you changed is worse than none, because it is confidently wrong.
Generate it from the same data that drives your site, if you can, so it cannot drift. Ours is built from the site's own configuration for exactly that reason — when a service changes, the file changes with it.
Where it sits in the order of things
If you are doing one thing this month for AI visibility, it is not this. It is checking that the AI crawlers are not blocked, and that your content exists in the HTML before JavaScript runs. Those two decide whether you are readable at all.
llms.txt is the third thing. Worth doing, quick, and only after the two that matter more. Our free AI visibility checker tests all three and tells you which ones you are missing.
