llms.txt
A proposed Markdown file at the root of a website that lists its most useful pages for AI tools to read.
llms.txt is a proposed file at the root of a website, at yourbrand.com/llms.txt, that gives AI tools a short guide to the site: a line on what the site does, and links to the pages most worth reading, written in Markdown. Some sites also publish llms-full.txt, with the full text of those pages in one file.
The idea comes from llmstxt.org. It's a proposal, not a standard that the AI platforms have agreed to follow.
How it differs from robots.txt
robots.txt tells bots what they may read. llms.txt suggests what they should read first. One sets permissions, the other is closer to a reading list.
For example, a software company's llms.txt might open with one line on what the product does, then link its pricing page, its docs and a page of facts about the company, each with a sentence on what's there.
Does it help you get named in AI answers?
There's no good evidence that it does yet. Google says its Search doesn't use special AI text files like this one, in its guide to optimizing for AI search. The tools known to read llms.txt are mostly coding assistants and agents that look things up in documentation.
It's cheap to add and carries little risk, but don't expect it to change your visibility on its own. The things that decide whether a platform can use your pages are still whether its bots can reach them, and whether the text is in the HTML they read.
In AnswerOrbit
We publish our own: the site's at /llms.txt and the docs' at /docs/llms.txt, with every docs page in full at /docs/llms-full.txt. Whether your pages can be read by AI bots at all is what the Audit and Pages tabs in Website check. See Website and AI traffic.