What is llms.txt, and should my website have one?

The idea was proposed in 2024 as a simple way to help language models make sense of a website. Instead of crawling hundreds of pages full of menus, scripts and adverts, a tool could read one short Markdown file at yoursite.com/llms.txt: a title, a one-paragraph summary of who you are, and a list of links to the pages that matter, each with a short note. Some documentation sites and software companies adopted it quickly, and several SEO plugins now generate one automatically.

The honest status is uncertain. It is a community proposal, not something Google, OpenAI or other major providers have committed to reading, and Google staff have said publicly that Google Search does not use it. There is also no reliable way to see whether any assistant fetched yours and acted on it. Anyone selling llms.txt as a route to AI citations is overselling a text file.

We still add one, for three reasons. It costs very little. It forces a useful discipline: writing down, in a few clear lines, exactly what the business does, where, for whom and which pages explain it, which is the same clarity AI search rewards everywhere else. And if any tool does use it, the file is there. The important rule is keeping it accurate. An llms.txt that lists last year's services or a phone number you no longer use is worse than none, so generate it from the same source as the rest of the site where possible, as we do on this website, or review it whenever prices, services or contact details change. Treat it as a small extra on top of the real work, not a substitute for it.