What llms.txt means
The idea is a curated, machine-friendly index — a short description of the site plus links to its most important pages, in plain markdown rather than HTML.
It's a community proposal rather than a standard from any major platform, and adoption by the systems it targets remains genuinely uncertain.
Why it matters for AI search
We implement it because it takes fifteen minutes, costs nothing, and might become meaningful. We won't pretend it's more than that.
Any agency positioning llms.txt as a core service line is dressing up a trivial task. The things that actually decide AI visibility are crawler access, rendering, entity clarity and corroboration.
See it in action
What an llms.txt file actually contains.
Cheap to implement, uncertain to matter.
Treat it as a hedge. Fifteen minutes of work for a possible future benefit is a reasonable trade — building a strategy around it is not.
How to get it right
Implementing it sensibly
- Put a plain markdown file at yourdomain.com/llms.txt
- Summarise what the organisation does in one or two sentences
- Link the pages you'd most want cited, grouped by section
- Keep it current — a stale file is worse than none
- Spend the remaining effort on robots.txt, rendering and entity work, which demonstrably matter
Common questions
Does llms.txt actually do anything?
Adoption by major AI platforms is unconfirmed. Some tools read it; the systems that matter most haven't committed to it.
We implement it as a cheap hedge, not because we can show it moves anything.
Is it a replacement for robots.txt?
No. robots.txt controls crawler access and is respected by every compliant crawler. llms.txt is descriptive and optional.
If you only do one, do robots.txt properly.
Should we pay an agency for llms.txt?
Not as a line item. It's a fifteen-minute task that should be included in any technical engagement.
If it's being sold as a distinct service, that's a signal about the rest of the offering.
Related concepts
These come up alongside llms.txt constantly.