`llms.txt` is a single Markdown file at the root of your site that describes, in plain language a model can parse, what your organisation is and where its important pages are. It's a proposed convention rather than a ratified standard, it takes about an hour to write, and it's frequently oversold. Here's the accurate version.
What it is
One file, at `https://yourdomain.com/llms.txt`, in Markdown. The conventional shape is a title, a one-paragraph summary of what you do, and then linked sections pointing to the pages that matter, each with a short description of what's there.
Ours opens with a paragraph naming what Gigabit is, the model we run, where our offices are, and how long we've been shipping — then a Key facts block with every price stated outright, then linked sections for pricing, services, industries, and proof. You can read it; it's about forty lines.
The design intent is a summary that survives being read without a browser: no navigation to traverse, no JavaScript to execute, no marketing copy to wade through. Just what you do, what it costs, and where the substance lives.
What it isn't
Three corrections, because this file attracts a lot of overclaiming:
It is not robots.txt. `robots.txt` grants or denies access; `llms.txt` offers a summary. They solve different problems and one doesn't substitute for the other. If your `robots.txt` blocks the AI crawlers, an `llms.txt` changes nothing at all.
It is not a ranking factor. No major assistant has publicly committed to reading it as an input to recommendations. Anyone telling you it will lift your citation rate is describing a hope, not a documented behaviour.
It is not a substitute for the pages themselves. The claims in it need to be true and verifiable on your actual site. A summary asserting things your pages don't support is worse than no summary — the verification step is exactly where an inconsistent entity gets quietly dropped from an answer.
So does it actually do anything?
The honest answer: not much yet, on its own, and it's still worth doing.
The case for adoption is cost, not evidence. It's an hour of work and a static file. The convention is being adopted by developer-tooling companies and documentation sites at a reasonable clip, several agent frameworks fetch it when pointed at a domain, and a machine-readable summary is trivially useful to anything programmatically inspecting your site — including tools you haven't heard of yet.
The case against overinvesting is that the things that demonstrably move citation rate are elsewhere: content in the raw HTML, pages that answer real buying questions, quotable facts, and consistent entity data across the web. Those are documented mechanisms. `llms.txt` is a cheap bet on a convention that may become significant. Treat it as the last item on the checklist, not the first — the five things that actually matter come before it.
How to write a good one
- Lead with what you are, in one paragraph. A stranger with no context should finish it knowing what you sell and to whom.
- Put the facts in, literally. Prices, dates, locations, numbers. This is the highest-value section, because specifics are what a model can quote and verify. If you publish pricing, state it here in figures.
- Link the pages that matter, with a description each. Not your whole sitemap — the ten or fifteen pages that carry the substance.
- Say what you are not. Ours notes we're tool-agnostic and not affiliated with any model vendor's deployment arm. Negative statements disambiguate, and disambiguation is the point.
- Keep it current. A stale file asserting last year's prices actively hurts you at the verification step.
Keep it short. This is a summary for a machine, not a brochure — ours is forty lines and that's about right.
The neighbouring files
Two others worth knowing, since they're often confused with it. `robots.txt` controls crawler access — check that the named AI agents are allowed, because an inherited blanket disallow silently negates everything else. `ai.txt` is another proposed convention stating your usage and citation policy; ours says citation is encouraged, names the attribution we'd like, and points at the `llms.txt`.
None of the three is a growth strategy. Together they take an afternoon and remove a category of dumb, invisible blockers — which is a reasonable definition of table stakes.
What to do instead, if you only have an afternoon
Write the file, then go spend the rest of the day on something with evidence behind it: check your key pages render their content in raw HTML, confirm the AI crawlers aren't blocked, and make sure your company name and description match across your site, your schema, and LinkedIn.
Then measure. The free citation audit tells you where you actually stand across the major assistants, which is a far better guide to what to fix next than any checklist — including this one. The full field guide covers the mechanisms that do the heavy lifting.
