An llms.txt file is a plain-text summary of your business, placed at the root of your website, written for AI assistants rather than for people. It tells a model what you do, where, for whom, and at what price — without making it piece that together from your marketing copy. It's optional, it takes about an hour, and it's one of the few AEO moves you can make in an afternoon.
The name follows the pattern of robots.txt, the file that's told search crawlers what they may and may not visit since the nineties. Same idea, different job: robots.txt controls access, llms.txt provides a summary.
The problem it solves
When an AI assistant tries to figure out what your business does, it reads your website the way it reads anything else — as a wall of text wrapped in navigation, headers, buttons, cookie banners, and marketing language.
Your homepage might say "We turn your vision into reality." A person understands that's filler and keeps reading. A model has to work out from context whether you're a construction company, a marketing agency, or a wedding photographer.
An llms.txt file skips the guessing. It states the facts directly, in the order that matters.
What goes in it
It's Markdown — no code, no special tools. A useful one for a local business covers:
- What the business is, in one sentence, with no adjectives you can't back up.
- Services offered, as a plain list — the words customers use, not internal product names.
- Where you operate. Actual cities and areas, not "the greater region."
- Hours, phone, and email, matching your website and your Google profile exactly.
- Pricing, if you publish it. Even "starting at" figures help a model answer the question instead of dodging it.
- Common questions and their answers, written the way a customer would ask.
- Key pages, with links, so the model knows where to go for detail.
It lives at yourdomain.com/llms.txt. That's the whole setup.
The rule that matters more than the format
Everything in it has to be true and has to match what's on your site. If your llms.txt says you're open Saturdays and your Google Business Profile says you're closed, you haven't helped an AI understand you — you've given it a contradiction, and a contradiction is a reason to name someone else instead.
We ran into exactly this on a client's site: the schema said Monday–Friday while the contact page advertised 24/7 emergency availability for healthcare work. Both had been true at different times. Neither was wrong on purpose. It still had to be fixed before anything else was worth doing.
Does it actually work?
Honest answer: llms.txt is a young convention, not an official standard, and no AI company has published a guarantee that they read it. Anyone promising you a specific ranking outcome from adding one is selling something.
What we can say is why it's still worth the hour. Writing it forces you to state plainly what your business does, where, and for how much — and that exercise tends to surface contradictions in your existing pages that definitely hurt you. The file costs nothing to host, can't hurt your traditional SEO, and if the convention keeps gaining ground you're already set up.
It is not a substitute for the rest. A perfect llms.txt on a site with no reviews, an unclaimed Google Business Profile, and blocked AI crawlers won't do much. It's one piece of getting recommended by AI assistants, not the whole thing.
Where to start
Read your own homepage and ask what a stranger would actually learn from it: what you do, where, for whom, at what price. If any of those take more than a few seconds to find, that's the real problem — and the llms.txt is just where you write down the fix.
If you want us to look, our SEO, GEO & AEO audit is free and includes whether AI engines can read your site at all. You keep the report either way.
Frequently asked
Is llms.txt an official standard?
Not yet. It is a proposed convention that a growing number of sites have adopted, and no search engine or AI company has committed to reading it. It costs almost nothing to publish, which is why it is worth doing anyway.
Will llms.txt make ChatGPT recommend my business?
By itself, no. It makes your information easy to read once an assistant is already looking at your site. What earns the recommendation is the same thing that always did: clear information, consistent details, and third parties vouching for you.
Where does the file go?
At the root of your domain, so it lives at yourdomain.com/llms.txt. It is a plain text file written in Markdown.
What happens if the information in it goes out of date?
It becomes worse than not having one. An assistant that reads an old price or a discontinued service will repeat it confidently. Treat it like your opening hours: if it changes, update it the same day.