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What is llms.txt and do you need one?
It is a plain-text file at the root of your site that summarizes what your business does and points to your key pages, written for AI systems rather than browsers. No major AI company has committed to reading it. It takes twenty minutes, so add one - just do not expect it to move anything on its own.
What it contains
A heading with your business name, a short paragraph summarizing what you do, then an annotated list of your important pages with a sentence each. Markdown, no styling, nothing clever.
Be clear on its status
It is a community proposal, not a standard. Unlike robots.txt, which every crawler honors, llms.txt is not documented as being read by OpenAI, Google or Anthropic today. Anyone telling you it is required is overstating.
Why to add one anyway
It costs almost nothing. Writing it forces you to state plainly what you do and which pages matter, which is a useful exercise regardless. And if adoption comes, you are already there.
What actually does affect AI crawlers today
Your robots.txt, which genuinely is honored. Check you are not accidentally blocking GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot or Google-Extended - plenty of sites block them without realizing, then wonder why they are never cited.
The short version
- Plain markdown file at your site root
- A proposal, not an adopted standard
- Twenty minutes of work; add it and move on
- robots.txt is the file that genuinely matters today
Related questions
Where does it go?
At the root: yoursite.com/llms.txt. Not in a subfolder.
Is there a full version?
Some sites publish llms-full.txt with entire page contents. Rarely worth it for a small site.
Will this replace sitemaps?
No. Keep your sitemap.xml.
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