llms.txt: What It Is and How to Write One for Your Site

llms.txt is a markdown file at the root of your website that gives AI assistants a short summary of your business and links to your most important pages. It was proposed in September 2024 and is still a proposal, not a standard that every assistant follows.

llms.txt is a proposed file, written in markdown and served at /llms.txt, that gives language models a curated summary of a site and links to its key pages.

• The only required element is an H1 with the site or project name.
• Optional: a one-paragraph summary in a blockquote, more text, and H2 sections of annotated links.
• A section named "Optional" holds links an assistant can skip when it needs less context.
• The proposal makes no claim about rankings or traffic.
• It takes ten minutes to publish and costs nothing, so it is cheap hygiene.

What is llms.txt, exactly?

The proposal, by Jeremy Howard, asks websites to add a /llms.txt markdown file "to provide LLM-friendly content". It lives at the site root, or at subpaths such as /docs/llms.txt for the pages under that path. Its structure is fixed enough for programs to read: a required H1, an optional blockquote summary, optional prose, and H2-delimited lists of links with short notes (llmstxt.org).

What does a good llms.txt look like?

This is a fictional example for a dental clinic. Replace every detail with your own:

# Example Dental Clinic

> Family dental clinic in Kraków: implants, whitening and orthodontics. Six clinics, English-speaking dentists.

## Services

- [Dental implants](https://example-dental.pl/implants): prices, process, aftercare
- [Teeth whitening](https://example-dental.pl/whitening): methods and prices

## Company

- [About us](https://example-dental.pl/about): team and qualifications
- [Contact and locations](https://example-dental.pl/contact): addresses, opening hours

## Optional

- [Blog](https://example-dental.pl/blog)

Does llms.txt help you get recommended?

The proposal itself makes no claims about search rankings or traffic, and we make none either. Whether a given assistant reads the file is up to that assistant, and you should check each engine's own crawler documentation, for example OpenAI's or Perplexity's, rather than assume. The reasons to publish one anyway are practical: it forces you to write a clear summary of your business, it gives any tool that does read it a clean starting point, and it costs almost nothing.

How do you write llms.txt for your site?

1. Write one sentence about your business. Who you are, what you sell, where, for whom. This becomes the blockquote.
2. Pick 5 to 15 pages that matter. Services, pricing, about, contact, locations and your best FAQ.
3. Group them under H2 headings such as Services, Company and Contact, each link followed by a short note.
4. Move secondary pages under "Optional". Blog archives and press pages belong there.
5. Save it as plain text called llms.txt and upload it to the root of your site so it opens at https://yourdomain/llms.txt.
6. Keep it current. Update it when you add or remove a key page.

Skip the typing: the llms.txt generator reads your site, writes the file in your site's language and lets you edit it before downloading.

What mistakes should you avoid?

• Linking to pages that redirect, return errors or are blocked in robots.txt. Check access with the AI crawler checker.
• Writing marketing slogans instead of facts. Use plain statements an assistant could quote.
• Listing every page. The point is a curated shortlist.
• Treating it as a substitute for structured data and clear page content. Run the AI-readiness audit to see what else is missing, read what GEO is for the bigger picture, and run the free AI Visibility Check to see whether assistants name you today.