llms.txt
What is llms.txt?
llms.txt is a Markdown file at the root of a website that gives AI assistants a short description of the business and a list of its most important pages. It was proposed in 2024 as a voluntary convention. It is not a ranking factor: Google said in 2025 that no AI system reads the file, and no major assistant provider has said otherwise since. It helps tools that someone points at the site on purpose.
Example
A bike-parts shop has 3,000 product pages. Its llms.txt does not list them all — it is not a sitemap. It lists the pages that answer what a buyer would ask an assistant:
- first line: the shop’s name as a heading;
- one sentence on what it sells and to whom;
- a “Catalogue” section with the ten main categories;
- an “Ordering” section covering delivery, returns and warranty;
- a “Help” section with the frame-size chart and contact details.
About twenty links, one line each, instead of 3,000 pages for an assistant to find its own way through. Our own site publishes one in Bulgarian and one in English, generated from the content in the admin panel so it keeps pace with the site.
Why it matters for a business
The file is often sold as essential for AI search. It is not. It earns no ranking in Google and guarantees no citation. Google’s answer in 2025 was blunt: server logs show the assistants’ crawlers fetching pages and not the file. Its real use today is narrower: AI tools and agents that someone points at your site can read it as a table of contents and reach the right page sooner. Far more weight sits elsewhere — pages that answer plainly, structured data, and a robots.txt that does not shut out the assistants you want to be quoted by.
Do you need one? It is not urgent, and it does no harm. If you add it, make it a table of contents for your most useful pages, not a list of everything.
What to ask
- Which pages go into the file, and who updates it when you add a service or a category?
- What does robots.txt tell the crawlers of OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity and Google? Access is decided there, not in llms.txt.
- Do the pages have a clean Markdown version for the file to point to?
- How will we know whether anything reads it? The server logs show every request for /llms.txt.
We write the file as one of the small tasks in SEO and AI search, and we do not present it as a shortcut to being cited.