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AI & Search

LLMs.txt

llms.txt file

Portrait of Lukas Horvath, co-founder of Roelu Studio
Lukas HorvathCo-founder

What is LLMs.txt?

An llms.txt file is a markdown file placed at the root of a domain (yoursite.com/llms.txt) that gives AI models a curated map of the site's most important content. It lists key pages, summaries, and links in a format LLMs can parse quickly. Unlike robots.txt, which controls crawling, llms.txt helps models find and understand the content you want them to cite.

Why it matters

Most websites are built for human readers and Googlebot. AI models have to guess which pages are canonical, which are marketing fluff, and which are out of date. An llms.txt file removes the guessing. You tell Claude, ChatGPT, and Perplexity exactly what your product does, where the docs live, and which case studies are real. The teams that publish a good llms.txt today get pulled into AI answers more often. The teams that ignore it let the model improvise — and improvised answers are how competitor names end up in your buyer's chat window.

How it works

You create a markdown file at yoursite.com/llms.txt with a short site description, then sectioned links to key pages — product, docs, pricing, customer stories — each with a one-line summary. Some teams also publish llms-full.txt, which inlines the actual content of those pages so models can ingest it without crawling. The standard was proposed by Jeremy Howard in 2024 and adopted quickly by tool vendors, search engines, and AI labs. You write it once, update it when your site changes meaningfully, and treat it like a sitemap for AI. No CMS plugin required — it is just a text file you ship alongside the rest of your static assets.

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