Field Guide › What is llms.txt, and do I need one?
What is llms.txt, and do I need one?
It's a plain text file at the top level of your website that tells AI systems, in simple language, what your business does and which pages matter most. It is a proposal, not a rule, and the big AI companies have not confirmed they use it. Cheap to add. Not urgent.
What is actually in the file?
Nothing complicated. It's a text file, the kind you could type in Notepad, saved at the front door of your website. So for you it would sit at yoursite.com/llms.txt.
Inside it you write a few lines: your business name, what you do, where you work, and a short list of links to the pages on your site that are worth reading. Services. Service area. Pricing. Contact.
The thinking behind it is reasonable enough. A normal web page is stuffed with menus, buttons, popups and code that have nothing to do with the answer somebody wanted. A short text summary skips all of that. If an AI system wanted a quick, clean description of your business, this is where it would find one.
That's the idea. Whether anybody is actually picking it up is the next question.
Is this the same thing as robots.txt?
No, and it's worth keeping them straight, because they get mixed together constantly.
robots.txt is old and settled. It has been part of how the web works for decades, and the automated visitors that read websites do respect it. Its job is permission: it says which parts of your site they may look at and which they should leave alone. If you ever wanted to keep an AI company's reader out of your site, robots.txt is the file that does it.
llms.txt is new and unsettled. It doesn't grant or block anything. It's a description, offered in the hope that something reads it.
One is a lock on a door. The other is a note taped next to the door. Only the lock is guaranteed to work.
Does anyone actually read it?
Here is the honest answer, and it's the reason this page exists: nobody can say for certain, and the major AI companies have not confirmed that they use it.
It is a proposal. Somebody suggested a useful convention, plenty of website owners liked the sound of it, and a fair number added the file. What has not happened is any of the companies behind ChatGPT, Google's AI answers, Perplexity or Claude publicly committing to read it. Until one of them says so plainly, treat every confident claim about it as guesswork.
You will find articles online telling you this file is essential and that adding it gets you into AI answers. They cannot support that. Be careful with anyone who states it as settled fact.
So do I need one?
Probably not urgently. But it costs almost nothing, so you may as well.
That's the whole answer. It's a few minutes of writing, it can't hurt anything, and if adoption does arrive you're already set up. What it is not is the thing that fixes your visibility in AI answers. Anyone selling you an llms.txt package as the solution is overselling a text file.
We have one on this site, at /llms.txt — go read it, it's about a page long. It took a few minutes to write. We keep it because it's sensible housekeeping, not because we think it's doing heavy lifting.
What actually moves the needle is duller and takes longer: your website saying clearly what you do, which towns you serve, and roughly what the work costs; answering the questions customers ask you on the phone, in writing, on your own pages; and other places on the internet describing your business accurately. That's the work. A summary file is a five-minute chore you do on the side.
Common follow-ups
Will it get me mentioned by ChatGPT?
On its own, no. Nothing about a summary file makes an assistant recommend you. What gets you named is what your pages actually say about the work you do and the towns you cover, and what other sources on the internet say about you.
Should I pay someone to make one?
Not as a line item on its own. Writing the file is a few minutes of typing. If someone quotes you a real fee for an llms.txt file, or says it is the thing standing between you and AI visibility, that is a sales pitch and not a technical fact.
Can having one hurt me?
Not in any way we know of. It's a small text file that describes your own business. The one thing to watch is letting it go stale. If it still lists a phone number or a service you dropped two years ago, you've published wrong information about yourself, and wrong is worse than nothing.