What is llms.txt?
llms.txt is a proposed plain-text file at your site root that gives AI models a curated, machine-readable summary of your most important content — an AEO analogue to robots.txt and sitemap.xml.
Where robots.txt controls crawling and sitemap.xml lists URLs, llms.txt is meant to hand language models a clean, prioritized briefing on what your site is and where the important content lives — in Markdown, without the noise of navigation and markup.
It is a convention, not a guarantee: not every engine reads it, and publishing one will not make an unknown brand get cited. What it does is remove friction — when a model does retrieve your site, a good llms.txt makes your key facts and pages easy to parse and quote correctly.
Treat llms.txt as table-stakes hygiene in an AEO setup: cheap to publish, helps accurate retrieval, but never a substitute for the authority and content work that actually earns citations.
Do AI engines actually use llms.txt?
Support is partial and evolving — some tools and crawlers read it, many do not yet. It is low-cost hygiene that can help accurate retrieval, not a guaranteed ranking lever.
What goes in an llms.txt file?
A short description of your site and a curated, linked list of your most important pages in Markdown, so a model can grasp and quote you without wading through full HTML.
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