the llms.txt file.
robots.txt told search crawlers what to read. llms.txt tells ai assistants who you are. here is how to write one.
llms.txt is a plain-text summary of your site for ai models — a clean, structured introduction to what you do. it is easy to add and helps assistants understand and represent you accurately.
as ai assistants increasingly read the web to answer questions, a new convention has emerged: a simple llms.txt file at the root of your site that hands models a clean, human-written summary of who you are and where the important pages live. think of it as a cover letter for the machines now reading you.
— 01what it is
llms.txt is a markdown file at your domain root (yoursite.com/llms.txt) that summarises your brand, lists your key pages, and gives context an assistant can use. it complements, not replaces, your sitemap and robots.txt.
a plain markdown file at your root that tells ai assistants what your site is, what matters on it, and where the canonical version of each thing lives.
it is a convention rather than a standard, which means adoption is uneven — but it costs an afternoon and nothing about it can hurt you.
and it is readable by humans, which is a useful side effect: it forces you to state plainly what your business does.
— 02what to put in it
- a one-line description of what you do and for whom.
- your locations and the markets you serve.
- links to your most important pages, with a sentence on each.
- key facts: founding, specialisms, contact.
a one-line description of the business, then a short list of your most important pages with a sentence each explaining what each answers.
include your service pages, your pricing, your contact route and your best explanatory content. leave out everything ephemeral.
and keep it current. a file listing pages that have moved is worse than no file, because it actively misdirects.
— 03why bother
a clean llms.txt reduces the chance an assistant misrepresents you and increases the chance it can accurately summarise and recommend your brand. it is low effort for a real upside as ai search grows.
because assistants increasingly summarise businesses rather than listing them, and the summary is built from whatever is easiest to parse.
a clear file makes the description of your business more likely to be yours rather than reconstructed from fragments.
and it pairs with the rest of the machine-readable layer — schema, faqs, consistent descriptions. none of them work alone and together they change what gets said about you.
— 04what it is not
it is not a ranking mechanism, and nobody should expect traffic from it directly. treat it as part of describing yourself accurately rather than as a growth tactic.
and it does not replace robots.txt or a sitemap. those still do their jobs, and this sits alongside them.