Learn · How-To

Should You Create an llms.txt File? (And How, If You Decide To)

Start with the honest part: the evidence for llms.txt is weak. Google has confirmed it does not support the convention, and a large-scale Ahrefs study across roughly 137,000 sites found the file is essentially never fetched by AI crawlers. We are not going to tell you it drives citations, because we cannot show you that it does. What it is: a plain Markdown file at the root of your domain giving a fast, structured summary of who you are, what you do and where your key pages live. It costs about forty-five minutes, it does no harm, and it is occasionally useful as an internal discipline — writing it forces you to state plainly what your business is, which is the same exercise that improves your actual pages. Treat it as housekeeping, not strategy, and spend the rest of your effort on schema correctness, entity consistency and quotable claims, which are where the measurable return lives.

1. 1

   Understand what llms.txt is (and isn't)

   It's a plain-text/Markdown file at yourdomain.com/llms.txt, not a schema standard or a guaranteed ranking factor. Think of it as a concise briefing document for an AI system, not a technical protocol like robots.txt.

2. 2

   Draft your "About" section first

   2-3 sentences stating what your business is, when it was founded, and where it operates. Specificity beats marketing language: a founding year and a headquarters city are more useful to a model than "industry-leading."

3. 3

   List your core services in plain language

   A short bulleted list naming what you actually do, avoiding internal jargon or vague category names a model would need to interpret.

4. 4

   Link your key pages

   Homepage, services, FAQ, case studies, blog, contact — so an AI system reading this file has a direct map to your most important content instead of guessing at your site structure.

5. 5

   State your service area and any location nuance clearly

   If you serve multiple countries or regions, list them explicitly rather than leaving it to be inferred from page copy.

6. 6

   Add contact and parent-company information if relevant

   For AI systems trying to verify a business is real and legitimate, structured basic facts — legal entity, incorporation date, contact channel — help.

7. 7

   Publish it at the root of your domain as plain text

   Save it as /llms.txt (not inside a subfolder), served as plain text or Markdown, no authentication required.