Key takeaways
- llms.txt is a plain text summary of your site, written for language models, sitting at yoursite.ca/llms.txt.
- It is a proposed convention. No major AI engine documents reading one, and Google has said it does not affect Search visibility or rankings.
- The Perplexity support story traces back to Perplexity publishing a file for its own site, which is authorship and tells you nothing about consumption.
- It is still worth having if it takes twenty minutes and stays accurate. A stale one that contradicts your site is worse than none.
- I ship llms.txt, llms-full.txt, and a pricing.md on every build, and I never bill any of them as AI visibility work.
On this page
What is llms.txt?
llms.txt is a plain text file at the root of your website that summarises what the site is, states the key facts about your business, and lists the important pages with a short note on each. It is written for AI models to read, and it lives at yoursite.ca/llms.txt. It is a proposed convention, and no major engine documents reading one.
The idea is reasonable enough. A modern website is a lot of markup wrapped around a little substance. If a model wants to know what your business does and what it charges, it has to crawl several pages and infer. A short file that just says it, in order, saves everyone the trouble.
That is the appeal, and it is genuine. What happened next is the part worth watching. A sensible proposal met an anxious market, and within a year llms.txt was being sold as an AI visibility service with a price attached. The file did not change. The invoice did.
A twenty-minute text file became a service line because everyone was scared of missing something. Write it if you like. Do not pay for it.
What goes inside an llms.txt file?
Four things: a heading and one paragraph describing the business, a plain list of key facts, a set of linked sections with a one-line note under each, and a last-updated date. No marketing adjectives, no claims that are not already public on the site. The file is a summary, so it should read like one.
- 01
A title and one honest paragraph
The business name as an H1, then a single paragraph that says what the business does, where it is, and who it serves. This is the part a model would quote if it read anything at all, so it is worth writing properly.
- 02
Key facts as a plain list
Location, founding year, contact email, service area, the offers and their real prices, and the social profiles you actually maintain. Short lines, no marketing adjectives, no claims you cannot back.
- 03
Linked sections with a note each
The important pages, grouped, each with a one-line description of what lives there. Services, industries, pricing, guides, contact. The note matters more than the link.
- 04
A last-updated date
One line near the top. Without it the file rots quietly and nobody notices, which is how a machine-readable summary ends up contradicting the site it summarises.
The temptation is to write it the way you would write a homepage, full of energy and promises. Resist that. This file gets read by something that will compress it further, so every adjective is weight without cargo. Say what you do, where, for whom, and what it costs. That is the whole job.
What is the difference between llms.txt and llms-full.txt?
llms.txt is the index and llms-full.txt is the contents. The short file lists what exists and where. The full file carries the actual substance, so a model reading it gets your services, your process, and your prices in one fetch without crawling twenty pages. One is a table of contents, the other is the book.
| llms.txt | llms-full.txt | |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | A short index of what the site is and where things live | The substance itself, in readable text |
| Length | A page or two at most | As long as the site has real content to summarise |
| Contents | Business description, key facts, linked sections with notes | Service descriptions, process, pricing, policies, FAQ answers |
| Effort to maintain | Minutes, when prices or hours change | Real work, which is why most sites should skip it |
| Worth it for a local business | Sure, if it is quick and stays accurate | Only if it can be generated from content you already maintain |
There is a third file in this family that gets ignored and quietly earns its keep: a pricing file. If your prices are public anyway, a plain pricing.md at the root gives every machine reading your site one unambiguous place to find them. It costs nothing, and it means no assistant has to guess a number about your business. Mine sits beside the other two and gets swept every time a price changes.
Does anything actually read llms.txt?
Not that anyone has documented. Google has said publicly that llms.txt is not needed for Google Search and will not positively or negatively affect visibility or rankings. OpenAI and Anthropic both publish crawler documentation, and neither mentions the file. The support story that circulates for Perplexity traces back to Perplexity publishing one for its own site.
- Google has stated publicly that llms.txt is not needed for Google Search and will neither help nor hurt visibility or rankings. Its guidance on AI features says the same thing in the other direction: no special optimizations are necessary because AI Overviews run on the core Search ranking systems.
- OpenAI
- The published documentation for OpenAI crawlers lists user agents and how robots.txt controls them. llms.txt does not appear in it.
- Anthropic
- Anthropic documents its crawler names and robots.txt handling. Same story: no mention of llms.txt.
- Perplexity
- Perplexity is the name most often used to claim support, and the reason is that Perplexity publishes an llms.txt for its own site. Publishing a file is authorship. It is not evidence that the engine reads yours.
I want to be careful here, because absence of documentation is not proof of absence. An engine could read the file tomorrow and never write it down. What I can say honestly is that as of July 2026, no major provider has published anything committing to it, and every confident claim I have chased has traced back to a vendor selling AI search services or to the Perplexity misreading above.
That is why my whole position on this file is: cheap, tidy, unbilled. The moment someone charges you for it as an AI visibility deliverable, they are charging for a promise no engine has made. The things that genuinely decide whether an assistant names your business are in my pillar guide on showing up in ChatGPT and AI search, and none of them are a text file.
Does your small business need one?
Need, no. Nothing breaks without it and no measurable result appears with it. Worth having, probably yes, on one condition: it has to stay true. An llms.txt with last year prices, an old service area, or hours that contradict your Google Business Profile actively works against you by giving a machine a second, wrong version of your business.
- Everything in the file is true today, including prices, because a stale machine-readable summary is worse than no summary.
- It agrees with your website, your Google Business Profile, and your directory listings on hours, service area, and contact details.
- It is written in plain sentences a person could read, since the whole point is a summary that survives being quoted.
- It carries a last-updated date, and you update that date when you change the file.
- It never contains a claim, a statistic, or a client name that is not already true and public on the site itself.
- It sits at the root of the domain, at yoursite.ca/llms.txt, served as plain text.
The honest ranking of effort goes like this. First, make sure your robots.txt lets the AI crawlers through, because access beats everything and a bad named group in robots.txt can lock out the exact crawler you wanted. Second, write pages that answer their own question in the first paragraph. Third, get your Google Business Profile complete and consistent, which for a local business is the highest-return hour on the list and is covered in my Google Business Profile guide. llms.txt comes somewhere after all of that, on the afternoon you have nothing more useful to do.
What I ship on every build, and what I refuse to charge for
Every site I build leaves with three machine-readable files: llms.txt, llms-full.txt, and a pricing.md. They cost me minutes because the content already exists in a form I can generate them from, and they never appear as a line item on an invoice. I will not bill for a file no engine documents reading.
The reason they are there at all is discipline, and it is a real one. Keeping a machine-readable summary current forces the site to have one honest version of itself. When a price changes, the page changes, the pricing file changes, and the llms files change in the same commit. If those ever disagree, an assistant reading my site has two answers and I have a problem. That habit is worth more to me than any speculative citation benefit.
What I do bill for is the work that has evidence behind it: pages that ship as static HTML with the answer in the source, a robots.txt that lets GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, and Google-Extended through, headings written as the questions people actually ask, and FAQ content that renders visibly on the page. That list is boring and it is what the documentation supports. If you already have a site and want someone to work out which of those are missing, that is exactly what the AI and systems assessment is for, at $300 and credited in full against a build.
How do you write one in twenty minutes?
Open a text file, describe the business in a paragraph, list the facts, list the pages with a note each, add a date, save it as llms.txt at the root of your site. If you can copy your own about page and your own price list without editing them, you are most of the way there already.
- 1Open a plain text file and write your business name as a heading, then one paragraph saying what you do, where you are, and who you serve.
- 2Add a last-updated date on its own line, in year-month-day form.
- 3List your key facts: location, service area, contact email, the year you started, and the social profiles you actually keep current.
- 4List your real offers with their real prices, matching what the website says to the dollar.
- 5Group your important pages into short sections with a one-line note under each link, so the summary explains itself.
- 6Read it beside your website and fix anything that disagrees, especially hours, prices, and service area.
- 7Save it as llms.txt at the root of your site so it loads at yoursite.ca/llms.txt, and put the update date in your calendar for whenever prices change.
Two habits make the difference between a file that helps and a file that rots. Update the date every time you touch it, and read it beside your live site once a season to catch drift. Prices move, service areas change, phone numbers get replaced, and a summary nobody checks becomes a confident piece of misinformation about your own business.
If you want to see one before you write yours, mine is at kootenaymade.ca/llms.txt. Nothing clever in it, which is the point. And if you would rather spend your afternoon on the work that moves the needle, start with why Google ranking and AI answers are two different fights, then have a look at how I build websites if the site itself is the thing holding you back.
Sources and further reading
- llmstxt.org: the llms.txt proposal
The original proposal that started the convention, including the suggested structure and the reasoning behind it. Worth reading so you can see for yourself that it is a proposal.
- Google Search Central: AI features and your website
Google documents that there are no additional requirements and no special optimizations necessary to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. The generative features run on the core Search ranking systems.
- OpenAI: overview of OpenAI crawlers
The official list of OpenAI user agents and how site owners control them with robots.txt. Notable for what it does not contain.
- Anthropic: does Anthropic crawl the web, and how can site owners control it
Anthropic crawler names and robots.txt control, published by Anthropic. Also silent on llms.txt.
- Kootenay Made Digital: my own llms.txt
The file I ship on every build, on my own site. Open it and you will see exactly what I mean by a short, honest, dated summary.
Frequently asked questions
What is llms.txt?
llms.txt is a plain text file at the root of a website that summarises what the site is, states the key facts about the business, and points to the important pages with a note on each. It is written for language models to read. It is a proposed convention, and no major AI engine documents reading one.
Does a small business need an llms.txt file?
Need is too strong. Nothing measurable happens when you add one, and Google has said publicly that it is not needed for Search and will not affect visibility or rankings. It is a cheap, tidy thing to have if your site can generate it in minutes. It should never be the reason you choose a web designer or the line item you pay extra for.
Does ChatGPT read llms.txt?
There is no published documentation saying it does. OpenAI documents its crawler user agents and robots.txt handling, and llms.txt does not appear in that documentation. The same is true of Anthropic. Perplexity is often cited as supporting it, but the evidence for that is Perplexity publishing an llms.txt for its own site, which is authorship rather than consumption.
What is the difference between llms.txt and llms-full.txt?
llms.txt is the short index: who you are, the key facts, and links to the important pages with a line about each. llms-full.txt is the expanded version that includes the actual content, so a model reading it gets the substance without crawling every page. Think of one as the table of contents and the other as the book.
Is llms.txt the same as robots.txt?
No, and the difference matters. robots.txt is a real, long-established standard that every serious crawler obeys, and it controls access. llms.txt is a proposed summary format with no enforcement and no documented readers. If you only have time for one, spend it on robots.txt and make sure the AI crawlers are actually allowed through.
Will llms.txt help me rank on Google?
No. Google has said it is not needed for Google Search and will not positively or negatively impact visibility or rankings. Anyone selling llms.txt as a ranking service or an AI visibility deliverable is charging you for a file you could write in twenty minutes, on a promise nobody has documented.
Does Kootenay Made Digital charge extra for this?
No. I ship llms.txt, llms-full.txt, and a pricing.md file on every build, and none of them appear as a line item, because I am not willing to bill for something no engine documents reading. Custom websites start at $2,000 for a Trailhead build and $6,500 for an Engine build, and those files come along with the rest of the machine-readable housekeeping.
Kootenay Made Digital
We build websites, local presence, and calm AI setups for Kootenay small businesses. No jargon, no agency fog, no surprise fees.
