llms.txt

A proposed convention for telling AI systems how to read your site. Emerging, not established.

The definition

llms.txt is a proposed file, placed at the root of a domain, offering a structured guide to a site’s content for large language models, conceptually similar to robots.txt or a sitemap, but aimed at comprehension rather than crawling permission.

It is a convention that has been proposed and adopted by some publishers and platforms. It is not a standard that all major AI systems commit to honouring.

The honest position

Adoption and support are uneven and changing. Anyone telling you an llms.txt file will get you cited is overstating what is known.

It is cheap to implement and unlikely to hurt, which is a reasonable basis for doing it, and a poor basis for charging much for it.

What we do

We publish one, because it costs little and makes our own structure legible. We do not sell it as a lever, and we do not attribute visibility changes to it.

Check it yourself

Check whether you have one at yourdomain.com/llms.txt. If you do, read it and confirm it still describes the site accurately.

Treat its absence as a low-priority gap rather than an emergency, whatever anyone selling implementation tells you.

See where you actually stand

A free Visibility Check runs twelve real buying questions for your category across three surfaces.