What Is llms.txt? A Practical Guide With Examples
llms.txt is a plain-text file placed at the root of your website — yoursite.com/llms.txt — that gives AI models a short, curated description of your business, your services and your most important pages. Think of it as an elevator pitch written for machines, in the same spirit that robots.txt is a set of instructions for crawlers.
Why it exists
AI models reading a modern webpage have to work through navigation, cookie banners, marketing copy and scripts to work out what a business actually does. llms.txt skips that: you state plainly who you are, what you offer and where to find the details.
It is written in Markdown, which is compact and unambiguous. There is no rendering, no layout, no JavaScript — just the facts you want a model to have.
What to put in it
Keep it short and factual. A page-long file is plenty for most businesses. Lead with a one-sentence summary, list your services, then link the pages you most want cited.
llms.txt template
# Your Business Name > One sentence: what you do, for whom, and where. ## Services - Service one: a short, specific description - Service two: a short, specific description ## Key pages - [Pricing](https://yoursite.com/pricing): what things cost - [About](https://yoursite.com/about): who we are - [Contact](https://yoursite.com/contact): how to reach us ## Contact City, State, Country — https://yoursite.com
An honest assessment of what it does
llms.txt is a proposed convention, not an official standard, and no AI engine currently guarantees that it reads one. Anyone promising that adding this file will get you cited by ChatGPT is overselling it.
What it does offer is cheap optionality. The file takes fifteen minutes to write, costs nothing to host, and very few sites have one. If adoption grows, you are already there. If it does not, you have lost fifteen minutes and gained a clear statement of your own positioning.
Treat it as a complement to the fundamentals, never a substitute. Unblocking AI crawlers, publishing structured data, and writing genuine question-and-answer content matter enormously more.
Frequently asked questions
Is llms.txt an official standard?
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No. It is a proposed convention that has gained informal traction. It is not published by a standards body and no major AI engine has committed to reading it.
Where do I put the llms.txt file?
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At the root of your domain, reachable at yoursite.com/llms.txt, served as plain text. On WordPress you can upload it to your site root via FTP or your host's file manager; on most static hosts you place it in the public folder.
Does llms.txt replace robots.txt?
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No, they do different jobs. robots.txt controls which crawlers may access which paths. llms.txt describes what your site is about. You want both.