llms.txt is a plain-text file, written in Markdown, that sits at yourdomain.com/llms.txt and gives AI tools a short summary of your site with links to the pages that matter most. Jeremy Howard proposed it in September 2024 on llmstxt.org. It’s a proposal, not an official web standard, and it isn’t a ranking factor. Google says Google Search ignores these files.
So does your website need one? No, but it’s cheap and harmless to keep, some tools do fetch it, and writing one makes you state plainly what your business does. Just don’t expect it to bring visitors on its own. It’s one small item in our SEO and AI visibility work, and far from the most important.
What the llms.txt proposal says
The idea is simple. AI tools have limited room for what they read at once, and a normal web page is full of menus, scripts and footers. A short file at a known address can point a tool straight to the useful pages.
The proposal sets out this structure, in this order:
- An H1 with the name of the site or project. This is the only required part.
- A blockquote summary with the key facts needed to make sense of the rest.
- Optional paragraphs or lists with more detail, but no headings.
- H2 sections with link lists. Each line is a Markdown link, optionally followed by a colon and a short note.
- An “Optional” section, by convention, for secondary links a tool can skip when it needs to keep things short.
The proposal also suggests offering clean Markdown versions of individual pages at the same address with .md added. That part is aimed mostly at documentation sites. A small business site can skip it.
What llms.txt is not
- Not robots.txt. robots.txt tells crawlers what they may and may not fetch. llms.txt controls nothing. If you want to allow or block AI crawlers, that’s a robots.txt job, covered in our guide on showing up in AI answers.
- Not a sitemap. A sitemap lists every page you want search engines to know about. llms.txt is short and selective: the pages you’d point a new customer to.
- Not a ranking factor on Google. Google’s guide to optimizing for its generative AI features says you don’t need special AI text files or markup to appear in Google Search, “as Google Search itself doesn’t use them.” A note on the same page adds that keeping llms.txt files for other services that use them is fine, and it won’t help or harm your visibility in Google Search, because Google Search ignores them.
- Not a promise of AI mentions. No file makes an assistant name your business.
Who actually reads it
Not many, so far. Ahrefs studied server logs across 137,000 domains, published in June 2026. Of the roughly 38,000 with a valid llms.txt file, 97% got no requests for it at all in May 2026. Among the named AI bots that did fetch the files, OpenAI’s GPTBot led with Claude Code, Anthropic’s coding assistant, near the top.
That fits how the file is mostly used today: developer tools and coding assistants reading documentation sites. Wix’s own developer documentation, for example, publishes an llms.txt. We haven’t found a public statement from the big AI search products saying their answers rely on llms.txt, so we don’t count on it.
You may already have one without knowing. Wix says it generates and maintains an llms.txt for sites on a premium plan with a custom domain and indexing turned on. Open yourdomain.com/llms.txt in a browser before writing one from scratch.
How to write one, using ours as the example
Here’s the start of our own file, trimmed and wrapped to fit, with the addresses as they read once our domain is connected. The full one also lists every service, industry and guide page on this site.
# Business Jet Fuel
> Business Jet Fuel, LLC is a web development and online-growth firm
> based in West Michigan, serving businesses across the United States.
> It builds websites, large online stores and member databases on
> Wix Headless with Astro [...] It is not an aviation or fuel company.
Contact: info@businessjetfuel.com, (616) 580-0996. Websites start at
$5,000 for the one-time build; each project is quoted in a written
proposal with monthly costs listed separately.
## Main pages
- [How we work](https://www.businessjetfuel.com/how-we-work): The seven steps of a project, from first call to monthly upkeep.
- [What drives the cost of a website](https://www.businessjetfuel.com/website-cost): The factors that set the price of a website, store or member site.
- [Contact](https://www.businessjetfuel.com/contact): Project form, phone and email.
## Services
- [SEO and AI visibility](https://www.businessjetfuel.com/services/seo-and-ai-visibility): Search work for Google, Bing and AI assistants.
- [Managed hosting and technical management](https://www.businessjetfuel.com/services/managed-website-hosting): Hosting, monitoring, fixes and monthly support hours.What each part does, and how to write your own:
- The H1 is the name of your business, exactly as customers search for it.
- The summary says what you do, for whom and where, in plain sentences. If your name could mislead, say what you are not. Ours sounds like an aviation fuel supplier, so the file says we aren’t one.
- The contact line holds the email and phone you actually answer, plus any fact customers always ask, such as a starting price, but only one you’re willing to stand behind in public.
- Sections group your pages the way your menu does: main pages, services, industries, guides. Pick headings that fit your business.
- Each note says what’s on the page in one line. “Roof repair, replacement and insurance claims in Kent County” helps a reader. “Quality you can trust” doesn’t.
- Leave things out. Thank-you pages, legal pages, tag pages and anything behind a login don’t belong.
Save it as llms.txt in UTF-8, put it at the root of your site where robots.txt lives, and open the address in a browser to check. Some hosts serve their own file at that address. Wix does, which is why ours is pushed into Wix’s setting after each release instead of uploaded as a file. On Wix you can edit the file under SEO & GEO, then Tools and settings, then Go to llms.txt.
Why it’s cheap to keep
- It’s one short file. Writing it is mostly copying your menu and adding a line per page.
- It can update itself. Ours is built from the same list of pages as our sitemap, so a new page appears in both on the next release. Wix’s automatic version updates itself too, until you edit it.
- It can’t hurt your Google rankings, by Google’s own statement.
- It’s a useful exercise. If you can’t sum up your business in two sentences for a machine, your home page probably doesn’t do it for people either.
If yours is written by hand, check it whenever you add or remove a page. A file full of dead links helps no one.
What matters more than llms.txt
Assistants answer from pages they can find and read. Pages with their words in the HTML, a sitemap, AI crawlers allowed in robots.txt, a site indexed in Bing, and plain facts on every service page all do far more than this file. Our guides to showing up in AI answers and Bing Webmaster Tools for AI search cover those steps.
How we can help
Our SEO work includes an llms.txt built from the site’s own page list, next to the sitemap and robots rules, so the three stay in step. If you’d like us to look at how your site reads to search engines and AI tools, see our SEO and AI visibility page or send your address through our contact page.