What Is llms.txt and Does Your Business Need One?

llms.txt is a plain-text file served at yoursite.com/llms.txt that describes your site for AI crawlers: what the business is, what the site covers, and which pages matter most. Think of it as the AI-era sibling of robots.txt — robots.txt says where crawlers may go, llms.txt says what they'll find and what's worth reading first. The format was proposed at llmstxt.org and is an emerging convention rather than an enforced standard.

Does your business actually need one?

Honestly weighed: llms.txt is cheap insurance, not a magic ranking lever. Adoption among AI crawlers is real but uneven, and no engine publishes exactly how it uses the file. The case for having one is the asymmetry — it takes ten minutes, can only help an engine summarise you more accurately, and its absence is increasingly conspicuous as more tools (ours included) check for it. For a business whose products or expertise are misdescribed by AI assistants today, it is the most direct channel you have to state, in your own words, what you are.

What goes in an llms.txt file?

The convention is simple markdown:

• An H1 with the site or business name.
• A blockquote summary — two or three sentences saying what the business does, for whom, and where.
• Sections of links to the pages that matter, each with a one-line description — your product pages, pricing, documentation, key guides.
• Optionally, a short facts section: concrete, checkable claims an engine can safely repeat.

A minimal template to adapt:

# Acme Accounting

> Acme provides fixed-fee accounting for UK limited
> companies. Founded 2019, based in Manchester,
> serving ~400 clients remotely across the UK.

## Key pages

- [Pricing](https://acme.example/pricing): Fixed monthly
  fees by company size, listed transparently.
- [Services](https://acme.example/services): Year-end
  accounts, VAT, payroll, self-assessment.

## Facts

- Fixed fees from £89/month, no onboarding charge.
- All accountants are ACCA or ICAEW qualified.

Where does the file live?

At the site root, served as plain text — /llms.txt, exactly like /robots.txt. One caution: some servers return a styled 404 page with HTTP 200 for unknown paths, which looks like an llms.txt but isn't; our scanner checks the content type of what actually comes back, and you should too. You can read ours as a live example, and the free scan will confirm yours is being served correctly.