What is llms.txt, and is it worth adding?

llms.txt is a proposed plain-Markdown file at the root of your site that gives AI assistants a short summary of what the site is and which pages are worth reading. It is cheap to add, but nobody can promise it earns you citations.

AI assistants read websites too, and a busy homepage full of menus and scripts is noisy to read. llms.txt is an idea to give them a clean shortcut. It was proposed in 2024 and is still a convention, not a standard that every AI product follows.

What goes in the file

• A title: the name of your site or product.
• A one or two sentence summary in a quote block.
• Sections of links to your most useful pages, each with a short note.

# Example Co

> Example Co is a simple invoicing tool for freelancers. Free for up to 5 clients.

## Learn
- [How invoicing works](https://example.com/guide): a five-minute overview.

## Product
- [Pricing](https://example.com/pricing): free and paid plans.

Save it as llms.txt at the root, so it loads at yourdomain.com/llms.txt.

Is it worth adding?

It takes about ten minutes and costs nothing, so for most small sites, yes. But be clear about what it is. Support varies between AI products, and no one has shown that adding it guarantees citations or traffic. Treat it as a tidy summary for any reader or tool that looks for it, not a ranking trick.

What matters more

• Pages that answer a question in the first sentence.
• Clear titles, headings and descriptions that crawlers can read.
• Not blocking AI crawlers in robots.txt if you want to be quoted.

Build yours in your browser with the free llms.txt generator. Nothing is uploaded.

Check your own site

Marlo's free audit crawls your homepage and checks the title, description, headings, canonical and social tags, with the fix for each. No signup.

Written by Marlo's maker. Marlo is open source (AGPL-3.0) and the audit code is public.