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What is llms.txt?

A small file that tells an assistant what your business is. Here is what it does, what it does not do, and whether it is worth your afternoon.

An llms.txt file sits at the root of a website, at yourbusiness.com/llms.txt, and describes the business in plain text written for a machine instead of for a page layout. No columns, no navigation, no photographs. Just the facts, in the order a reader would want them.

The idea borrows from robots.txt, the file that has told search engines where they may go since the nineties. The difference is what each one is for. robots.txt is about permission. llms.txt is about meaning.

Why the file exists at all

A web page is built for a person. Your hours are in the footer in small type, your prices are on a third page, and the thing you are known for is in a photograph of a chalkboard. A person handles all of that without noticing. A machine reading the same page has to work out which numbers are prices, which are phone numbers, and which of the three sets of hours is current.

It usually gets that right. Usually is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and the times it gets it wrong are the times a customer is told you close at five when you close at seven.

The file is a way to say it once, unambiguously, so there is nothing to work out.

The honest part

This is a proposed convention, not a standard. Nobody is required to read it. No assistant has promised to honour it, and the companies building them have been quiet on the subject.

What we can tell you is what our own server sees, which is that crawlers do fetch it. That is not the same as an assistant using it to answer a question, and we are not going to pretend the two are the same thing.

So: worth having, because it costs nothing and the file is trivial to keep true. Not worth paying anybody a lot of money for, and not a substitute for the real work, which is getting the words on your actual pages readable.

What ours contains

Every site we build publishes one. It is generated from the same facts the pages render from, so the file and the site cannot disagree with each other. When your hours change, both change.

That is the part most hand-written ones get wrong. A file written once in March and forgotten is worse than no file at all, because now there are two versions of your hours on the internet and one of them is wrong.

You can read ours if you want to see what one looks like.

Questions people ask

What is llms.txt?
A plain text file at the root of a website, at /llms.txt, that describes the business in language written for a machine rather than for a page layout. It is the same idea as robots.txt, which tells crawlers where they may go, except this one is about meaning rather than permission.
Do AI assistants actually read llms.txt?
Some fetch it and none are obliged to. It is a proposed convention rather than a standard, and no assistant has promised to honour it. We publish one on every site because the cost is nothing and the downside is nothing, and because we can see in our own logs when a crawler asks for it. Anyone telling you it guarantees you a mention is selling something.
Is llms.txt the same as robots.txt?
No. robots.txt is permission: which crawlers may visit which parts of the site. llms.txt is description: who this business is, what it sells, where it is, and where the important pages are. A site should have both, and they do different jobs.
Should my restaurant have an llms.txt file?
It will not hurt and it might help a little. It is nowhere near the most valuable thing you could do, though. Getting your menu out of a photograph and into text is worth more than a hundred of these files, because that is the content an assistant is actually trying to read.
How do I write one?
It is markdown. A heading with the business name, a one-line summary, then sections for what you offer, where you are, your hours and your main pages. Keep it short and keep it true. The danger is not formatting, it is writing something the site itself contradicts.

Next: how to tell whether an assistant has actually read your site, and why an assistant might not be mentioning you.

Every site we build publishes one.

Along with the rest of the work that actually moves the needle. Built before you pay anything.

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