Knowledge
llms.txt: three paragraphs that tell an AI who you are.
Answer engines read websites differently from Google: they look for plain text they can cite. llms.txt is a young standard that delivers exactly that - a text file at the domain root with the essentials.
Updated: 22 August 2026
What the file is
llms.txt follows the idea of robots.txt: a file at a known address that machines read before crawling the site. Instead of crawl rules it contains a summary in Markdown - a heading, one paragraph of description, lists with links and short descriptions of the key pages.
The proposal comes from the AI developer community and is being adopted by a growing number of sites and tools. It is not binding - which answer engine reads it and when is not documented.
What belongs in it
- One line naming the business: name, place, offer.
- Two to three paragraphs in plain language: what you do, for whom, what sets you apart - with numbers if you have them.
- Links to the pages an AI should cite: services, industries, products, contact.
- No marketing phrases. Machines cite facts, not adjectives.
What it does - and what it does not
Google ignores llms.txt for ranking. Answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity or Claude can use it as a compact source when summarising a site - whether and when is up to the provider. The file does not replace a readable website: if offer, location and contact are not on the site itself, the short version will not help either.
Our analyzer checks for llms.txt as a low-weight finding - honestly classified: a signal, not a lever.
Common questions
Does llms.txt need to be in the sitemap or robots.txt?
No. It simply lives at /llms.txt and is fetched directly. A link to it does no harm but is not required.Does llms.txt replace structured data?
No. JSON-LD is the standard Google and AI engines read for types like organisation, product or FAQ. llms.txt adds plain text - both together is the clean solution.
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