What is llms.txt?
llms.txt is a plain-text file at yourdomain.com/llms.txt that gives AI assistants a curated map of your site - what you do, which pages matter, and what is true about your business. Think robots.txt, but for comprehension instead of permission.
The problem it solves
AI assistants answering questions about your business work from whatever they can parse quickly - and most websites bury the essentials across dozens of pages of marketing copy. llms.txt puts the facts in one predictable place: what the business does, key pages, pricing, differentiators. You are writing the summary you want AI to work from, instead of leaving it to inference.
What goes in the file
The emerging convention is simple Markdown: an H1 with the business name, a blockquote summary, then sections linking key pages with one-line descriptions. A fuller companion file, llms-full.txt, can carry expanded detail. Keep it factual and current - an llms.txt that contradicts your site is worse than none.
Who reads it today
Honestly: adoption is early and no AI vendor guarantees consumption. But the file costs minutes to create, several AI crawlers fetch it in practice, and the discipline of writing it - deciding your canonical facts and priority pages - improves your AI visibility even where the file itself is not read. Low cost, asymmetric upside.
How to add one
Create a plain text file named llms.txt, write the Markdown summary, and have it served at your domain root alongside robots.txt. On most platforms that is a one-file upload to the public directory. Reference it with a comment in robots.txt if you like - AuditHQ does both on this site: see audithq.com.au/llms.txt for a live example.
llms.txt is one signal among several
The file works alongside structured data (schema.org markup), server-rendered content, AI-crawler access in robots.txt, and consistent entity signals across your profiles. AuditHQ’s AI Visibility suite checks all of these together - llms.txt presence and quality is one check among many, which is the right way to weight it.
Frequently asked questions
Is llms.txt an official standard?
It is a community proposal (proposed by Jeremy Howard of Answer.AI in 2024), not a ratified web standard. Adoption is voluntary and growing. Like robots.txt in its early years, its value comes from convention, not decree.
Will llms.txt improve my Google rankings?
No - Google search does not use it as a ranking signal. Its purpose is AI assistant comprehension and citation (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and similar). For Google rankings, structured data and conventional SEO remain the levers.
What is the difference between llms.txt and robots.txt?
robots.txt controls access - which crawlers may fetch which paths. llms.txt aids comprehension - a summary AI systems can read to understand your site quickly. They complement each other and both live at the domain root.