What is llms.txt?
llms.txt is a plain-text file at yourdomain.com/llms.txt that can give participating tools a curated map of your site: what you do, which pages matter, and what is true about your business. It is optional, experimental, and separate from robots.txt.
The problem it may help with
Tools that explicitly support llms.txt can use it as a concise, predictable summary of the site. That can be useful because the facts that actually matter - what you do, who you serve, what makes you different, roughly what things cost - are often scattered across pages written for human scanning rather than machine reuse. The important limit is adoption. A present llms.txt file does not prove that ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini or any other answer engine fetched it, used it, or cited the site because of it. Treat the file as a maintained source-of-truth aid for compatible clients, not as a visibility guarantee.
What goes in the file
The emerging convention, set out in Jeremy Howard's original proposal, is deliberately plain: an H1 with your business name, a blockquote with a one or two sentence summary, then a handful of Markdown sections that link your key pages with a short description of each - services, pricing, contact, case studies. There is no schema to validate against and no required fields beyond the H1, which is part of the appeal: any business owner can write one in a text editor without special tooling. A fuller companion file, llms-full.txt, can carry expanded detail for systems that fetch more than the summary. Whichever version you publish, treat it as a claim you are making about your business rather than a copy-paste job. An llms.txt that states a price you no longer charge, or a service you no longer offer, is actively worse than not having the file at all, because it hands an AI assistant a confident wrong answer to repeat.
Who reads it today
Honestly: adoption is early, and no major AI or search provider has published a universal guarantee that it fetches or weights llms.txt for recommendation answers. Google has separately said no new AI text files or special markup are required to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. The reason AuditHQ still checks it lightly is practical rather than magical: the file is quick to review, and the discipline of writing one can expose stale business facts. Deciding your canonical one-line description, your priority pages and your non-negotiable facts is useful even when the file goes unread. It is a low-cost documentation exercise, not a guaranteed visibility win.
How to add one
Create a plain text file named llms.txt, write the Markdown summary described above, and have it served at your domain root - yourdomain.com/llms.txt - sitting alongside robots.txt and sitemap.xml. On most hosting platforms and site builders this is a one-file upload into the public or static directory; if you are on a framework like Next.js or a static site generator, it usually just needs to live in the public folder so it is served unmodified at build time. You can reference it with a short comment in robots.txt if you want to make it easy for automated tools to discover, though this is a courtesy rather than a requirement since the file lives at a predictable, well-known path already. AuditHQ does both on this site: the file is referenced from robots.txt and served live at audithq.com.au/llms.txt, so you can see a real, current example rather than a hypothetical template.
llms.txt is one optional signal among several
The file sits alongside stronger, better-understood signals: crawlable pages, visible text, accurate structured data where supported, explicit crawler policy in robots.txt, and consistent entity facts across your Google Business Profile, LinkedIn and directory listings. AuditHQ's AI Visibility suite checks all of these together as part of a single audit, and llms.txt presence and quality is one check among many rather than the headline metric. That is the right way to weight it: a perfect llms.txt sitting on top of pages that cannot be fetched or understood is not a solution. Treat it as a useful finishing touch for compatible workflows, not a shortcut around the underlying work.
Getting the content right, not just the format
The most common mistake businesses make when they finally sit down to write an llms.txt is copying marketing language straight out of their homepage hero section. Phrases written to feel aspirational to a human reader - built for the modern era, trusted by businesses everywhere - are exactly the kind of vague claim an AI summary should avoid, because they give a model nothing concrete to repeat back to a user who asked a specific question. Write it the way you would brief a new employee who has thirty seconds to learn what your business does: plain nouns, real locations, real service names, actual differentiators. If you are a licensed electrician in Geelong who does emergency callouts, say that - not that you deliver electrical solutions with a commitment to excellence. The file rewards specificity in the same way a good meta description or a well-written FAQ answer does, and for the same underlying reason: systems that summarise on your behalf can only be as precise as the source material you hand them.
Frequently asked questions
Is llms.txt an official standard?
No. It is a community proposal, put forward by Jeremy Howard of Answer.AI in 2024, not a ratified web standard backed by a standards body or endorsed by any single AI vendor. Adoption is voluntary and has grown organically among developers and SEO practitioners rather than being mandated. In that respect it is similar to robots.txt in its early years - a convention that gained authority through widespread, consistent use rather than through a formal decree, and one whose long-term status is still being worked out in public.
Will llms.txt improve my Google rankings?
No. Google's AI features guidance says no new machine-readable files, AI text files or special schema are required for AI Overviews or AI Mode, and llms.txt should not be treated as a Google ranking signal. If your goal is to improve organic search, the work is still crawlability, indexability, helpful content, page experience, links and accurate supported structured data.
What is the difference between llms.txt and robots.txt?
robots.txt controls access - it tells crawlers which parts of your site they are and are not permitted to fetch, and it has existed since the mid-1990s as a near-universal web convention. llms.txt is about comprehension rather than permission - it does not block or allow anything, it simply offers a concise, curated summary that an AI system can read to understand your site faster than it could by crawling every page itself. The two are complementary rather than competing: a site can use robots.txt to explicitly welcome AI crawlers and llms.txt to help those same crawlers understand what they are looking at once they arrive, and both conventionally live at the domain root.
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