What is llms.txt, and does your business need one?

llms.txt is a proposal, published in September 2024 by Jeremy Howard, for a single file at the root of your website, at yoursite.com/llms.txt.

It is written in Markdown, and it contains a short, clean description of what your site is and where the important pages live. The idea is that when an AI tool needs to understand your site, it can read one tidy summary rather than crawling and inferring from your navigation, your marketing copy, and whatever else it finds.

The format is simple. A title, a one-paragraph summary in a blockquote, then headed sections listing your key pages with a line explaining each.

Think of it as the difference between handing someone a map and letting them wander the building.

It is not the same as robots.txt, though the name invites the confusion.

robots.txt is a set of rules. It tells crawlers what they may and may not access. It is widely supported and enforced by convention.

llms.txt is an explanation. It tells a model what your site is about. It grants no permissions and blocks nothing.

If a crawler is blocked in your robots.txt, an llms.txt file will not help you at all, because nothing will ever fetch it. That ordering matters and gets missed constantly.

Here is what people selling you services will not say plainly.

It is a proposal, not an accepted standard. The specification itself describes it as open for community input. No major AI provider has publicly committed to reading it, and there is no confirmation from any of them that it influences what their tools say about your business.

So anyone telling you that llms.txt is how you get into ChatGPT is guessing, or worse.

Three reasons, and I think they hold up.

It costs twenty minutes. This is the whole argument, really. A low-probability benefit at a genuinely trivial cost is a reasonable bet. Most AEO advice asks for weeks.

The exercise is worth more than the file. To write it, you have to state plainly what your business is, who it is for, and which of your pages actually matter. Most businesses have never written that down anywhere. People routinely find the exercise more valuable than the artifact, because it exposes that their own site has no clear centre.

If it does get adopted, you are already done. And if it never does, you lost twenty minutes and gained a clear summary of your own business.

What I would not do is pay anyone a meaningful amount of money to produce one, or treat it as a priority over the things that demonstrably matter.

Create a plain text file called llms.txt and put it at the root of your site, so it loads at yoursite.com/llms.txt.

The shape:

# Your Business Name

> One paragraph. What you do, who for, and where.
> Plain language, no adjectives, no slogan.

## Key pages
- [Services](https://yoursite.com/services.html): what you actually sell
- [Pricing](https://yoursite.com/pricing.html): ranges and what changes them
- [Case studies](https://yoursite.com/work.html): what you built and what happened

## About
- [About](https://yoursite.com/about.html): who runs this and why
- [Contact](https://yoursite.com/contact.html): how to reach you

Three rules that make the difference between a useful one and a pointless one:

• Use full URLs, not relative paths.
• Describe each link, do not just list it. The description is the part carrying the meaning.
• Write it for a stranger, not for a customer who already knows your industry. No jargon, no positioning language.

Ours is at theideaforgelabs.com/llms.txt if you want to see a real one. It is short, and deliberately so.

Worth being blunt, because this is where the overselling happens.

• It will not get you cited if your site has nothing quotable on it.
• It will not fix inconsistent information elsewhere on the web.
• It will not override a robots.txt that blocks AI crawlers.
• It is not a submission form. There is no console, no placement program, and nobody to pay.
• It will not compensate for a site that never says plainly what you sell.

An llms.txt file describes what is already there. If what is already there is vague, you have written a tidy map of a confusing building.

If you have twenty minutes and want to feel productive about AI visibility, write one. It is harmless, mildly useful, and the exercise clarifies your own thinking.

If you have a weekend, spend it on the six fixes that are known to matter: being findable at all, describing your business identically everywhere, answering the questions buyers actually ask, and publishing facts specific enough to be repeated.

Those work today, with evidence, regardless of what happens to this proposal.

llms.txt is a sensible bet at a small price. It is not the lever anyone is looking for, and treating it as one is how people end up with a perfect little file pointing at a website that still does not say what it sells.