What is llms.txt?
llms.txt is a small text file at the root of your website that tells AI tools, in brief, who you are and which pages matter most. It is quick to make and does no harm, but it is not what decides whether ChatGPT recommends you.
By Discoverable team
What goes in the file?
The file lives at your-domain.com/llms.txt and is written in plain Markdown. The proposal appeared in 2024 and suggests a fixed shape:
- A heading with the company name.
- A short summary of what you do and for whom.
- Lists of links to your most important pages, each with one line on what the page covers.
The idea is that a language model can get an overview of your website quickly without wading through menus, cookie banners and scripts. Ours is at discoverableagency.com/llms.txt if you want to see an example.
Do ChatGPT and the others use it?
As far as we know, none of the major AI assistants has confirmed that it uses llms.txt when writing answers. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity get their knowledge from your regular pages and from their search index. The file is mostly used by developer tools and by AI agents that need to read documentation.
That may change, which is a reason to have one. But it does not replace the work that actually moves things.
What matters more?
- That AI crawlers are let in by robots.txt and your firewall.
- That your key pages say clearly what you do, for whom and where, in text and not only in images.
- That schema.org data describes the company, your services and your prices.
- That other credible sites mention you, because those are the sources assistants cite.
How to make one
Write the file by hand or let your CMS generate it so it stays current as you add pages. Keep it short, reuse the descriptions from the pages themselves and update it when your services or prices change. An outdated llms.txt is worse than none.
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