What is llms.txt, and does your business need one?

A one-page text file has become the standard way to talk to AI crawlers directly. Here is what llms.txt does, and how to write yours in an hour.

What llms.txt is

llms.txt is a plain text file placed at the root of a website that gives AI systems a concise, curated summary of who you are and links to your key content. Think of it as a front door for AI: instead of forcing a crawler to piece your business together from dozens of pages, you hand it the accurate version directly.

Why it exists

Web pages are built for humans: navigation, styling, scripts, marketing copy. AI systems have to strip all that away to find the facts. The llms.txt convention, proposed in 2024, gives sites a standard place to publish a clean, markdown-formatted summary that language models can ingest without the noise. A companion file, llms-full.txt, can carry the complete detail in one document.

Does your business need one?

It is one of the cheapest AI visibility wins available. It will not transform your AI presence on its own, because assistants still lean primarily on your actual pages and on third-party sources. But it costs an hour, removes ambiguity about what your business does, and signals that your site is built to be read by machines. There is no downside.

What a good llms.txt contains

• A one-paragraph factual summary of the business: what it does, who for, where.
• Links to the pages that matter, each with a one-line description.
• Key facts a model should get right: services, pricing, contact details, legal entity.
• Anything you are frequently asked, answered plainly.

An example you can look at

AI Search King publishes its own at aisearchking.com/llms.txt, with the full version at llms-full.txt. Copy the structure, replace the facts with yours, and upload it to your site root.

Read next

• Schema markup, explained for business owners
• How to get recommended by ChatGPT
• How to monitor what AI says about you