If you’ve read anything about AI search this year, you’ve probably seen someone insist your website needs an “llms.txt” file. Some people call it the robots.txt for AI. Others say it’s the secret to getting ChatGPT to recommend you.
I just added one to every website we manage, so I’ve spent real time with it. Here’s the plain version: what it is, what it does not do, and whether a local business should bother.
What llms.txt actually is
It’s a single text file that lives at the root of your website, like yourbusiness.com/llms.txt. Inside is a short, plain summary of your business and a list of your most important pages, each with a one-line description.
That’s it. No code, no plugin, no special format beyond simple headings and links. You can open ours at thatsocialgeek.com/llms.txt and read it in about a minute.
The idea came from Jeremy Howard at Answer.AI in September 2024. His point was simple. AI tools that read websites waste a lot of effort digging through menus, pop-ups, and page layouts to find the useful parts. A clean summary at a predictable address hands them the useful parts directly.
What it does not do
This is where a lot of the hype falls apart, so let’s be honest about it.
llms.txt is a proposal, not an official standard. No major AI company has promised to use it. Google has said publicly that its search systems don’t rely on it. Adding the file will not, by itself, move you up in Google or get you named by ChatGPT tomorrow.
Anyone who sells llms.txt as a ranking trick is selling you something. It isn’t one.
So why did I add it everywhere?
Three reasons, and none of them depend on the hype.
It costs almost nothing. On our sites the file is generated automatically every time the site rebuilds. Publish a new blog post and it shows up in llms.txt on its own. Nobody has to remember to update it, so it never goes stale.
Some AI tools already read it. Assistants that browse the web and a growing number of AI agents check for it when they land on a site. When they do, they get your real services, your real service area, and your best pages, instead of guessing from whatever they scraped.
It forces clarity. Writing a two-line summary of your business and picking your ten most important pages is a surprisingly useful exercise. If you can’t say what you do and where you do it in two sentences, neither can a machine. The same clarity helps every other kind of search too.
What matters more than llms.txt
If you’re choosing where to spend your time, llms.txt belongs near the bottom of the list. The things that decide whether AI recommends a local business are the same things I covered in Will AI Recommend Your Queen Creek Business?:
- A fast website with one clear page per service
- Your name, address, phone, and hours matching everywhere online
- A Google Business Profile that’s complete and active
- Real reviews that describe real work
- Content that answers the questions your customers actually ask
Get those right first. llms.txt is the bow on top, not the box.
Should your business have one?
If your website is built so it can be generated automatically, yes. It’s a small, low-effort addition that can only help, and it keeps working in the background as you add pages.
If adding it means paying someone to hand-edit a file every month, skip it for now and put that money into the list above.
Want to know how your site looks to AI tools and search engines today? That’s part of every website optimization project we take on, and I’m happy to take a look.
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