What is llms.txt?
llms.txt is a plain-text Markdown file at the root of your site (yoursite.com/llms.txt) that gives language models a short, curated map of your most useful pages. It was proposed in 2024 by Jeremy Howard of Answer.AI as a way to help models find clean content without parsing navigation, scripts and layout. It's a proposal, not a web standard, and it doesn't replace robots.txt or your sitemap.
Where robots.txt tells crawlers what they may fetch and a sitemap lists every URL, llms.txt is closer to a reading list: the ten to thirty pages that best explain what you do, each with one line of context. Our explainer on what llms.txt is and whether it helps goes deeper on the history.
File | What it does | Who reads it |
|---|---|---|
robots.txt | Allows or blocks crawlers by path | Search and AI crawlers, widely respected |
sitemap.xml | Lists every indexable URL | Search engines |
llms.txt | Curated reading list with summaries | Some AI tools and agents; no major provider guarantees it |
Does llms.txt help AI visibility?
So far, the evidence says no measurable lift. Ahrefs found 97% of llms.txt files it checked got zero requests. A 2026 SE Ranking study of 300,000 domains found no measurable citation lift from having one. Google's guidance on its AI features calls llms.txt unnecessary for appearing in AI Overviews and AI Mode.
So why build one? It takes ten minutes, it costs nothing to host, and some coding assistants and agent tools do read it when a user points them at your docs. If you have developer documentation or an API, it's worth having. If you run a five-page marketing site, the time is better spent on the fixes in our AEO score checker. Our verdict piece, llms.txt: should your website have one?, covers both sides.
How does the llms.txt generator work?
The generator follows the format in the original proposal. You fill in the fields, and it writes the file in the order the proposal specifies. Nothing is sent to any AI model: it's a form that formats your inputs.
Name your site
This becomes the file's top-level heading, the only required element. Use your company or product name exactly as it appears elsewhere.
Write a one-paragraph summary
This becomes a blockquote under the heading. Say what you do, for whom and what makes you different, in two or three plain sentences.
Add your key pages
For each page, add the title, the full URL and a one-line description. Start with the homepage, pricing, product or service pages, docs and comparisons.
Group pages into sections
Sections become second-level headings, such as Product, Pricing, Docs or Company. Put nice-to-have links in a section called Optional, which the format reserves for content a tool can skip.
Copy the output
The generator gives you plain text. Save it as llms.txt with UTF-8 encoding.
Hypothetical example: what a filled-in file contains
For example, suppose a startup called Acme Ledger, which sells bookkeeping software for agencies, fills in the generator.
Heading: Acme Ledger.
Summary blockquote: Acme Ledger is bookkeeping software for creative agencies with 5–50 people. It tracks project profitability and syncs with the main accounting tools.
Section Product: the homepage, the features page and the integrations page, each with a one-line description.
Section Pricing: the pricing page, described as plans, seat pricing and what each tier includes.
Section Docs: the getting-started guide and the API reference.
Section Optional: the blog index and the careers page.
The whole file is under 40 lines. Short and accurate beats long and complete.
How do you publish llms.txt on your site?
The file must be reachable at yoursite.com/llms.txt, served as plain text. How you get it there depends on your platform, and platform features change, so check the current documentation before you start.
- Next.js: put llms.txt in the public folder, and it's served from the root on the next deploy. To build it from your CMS, generate it with a route handler instead. See the Next.js documentation for current file conventions.
- Webflow: upload the file in your site settings under SEO (LLMs.txt). Webflow asks for a UTF-8 file under 100 KB and serves it on your custom domain, not on webflow.io staging. See our Webflow AEO guide.
- Framer: upload llms.txt as a static file in site settings (Hosting). Static files are on the Pro and Enterprise plans; on a lower plan, a proxy such as a Cloudflare Worker in front of the site can serve it. See our Framer AEO guide.
- Any platform: after publishing, open the URL in a private window and confirm it loads as text, not as a 404 or an HTML page.
What matters more than llms.txt for AI search?
Crawler access, server-rendered content, answer-first pages and off-site mentions matter far more. Make sure robots.txt and your CDN allow the AI search crawlers, and that your pricing and comparisons are in real HTML. Read how to build an AI-search-ready website for the build side.
If the fixes you need are structural, that's site work. Our website package is $8,000 for up to 6 pages, with custom design, a Next.js build, a CMS and animation, and we can generate llms.txt from the CMS as part of the build. See our AEO website service, or start with a free 30-minute call.