What is llms.txt, and does your business website need one?

What it is

llms.txt is a plain text file at the root of your website (yoursite.com/llms.txt) written in simple Markdown. It summarizes who you are, what you do, where, for whom, and links to your most important pages. It exists so AI systems can get an accurate picture of your business without inferring it from your navigation menu and your footer.

It is the AI equivalent of robots.txt and sitemap.xml: a convention, not a law, adopted by a growing number of sites because it is cheap and it helps.

What goes in it

A one-paragraph description of the business. A list of services with one line each. Locations served. The people who run it, with titles. Links to pricing, contact, proof and your best guides. Optionally a longer companion file, llms-full.txt, with the full text of your key pages.

Ours is at webmarketflorida.com/llms.txt if you want an example.

Does it help?

It removes ambiguity. An assistant that reads "Web Market Florida is an Orlando SEO and web design company founded in 2006, serving Central Florida locally and national clients remotely, with Local SEO from $150/month" no longer has to guess whether you are a national agency, a freelancer or a directory. Whether any given assistant reads the file today matters less than the fact that it costs ten minutes and the direction is clear.

Three things to get right

1. Accuracy. Every claim in it should match your website and your Google profile.
2. Specificity. "Orlando dentist offering implants, Invisalign and emergency care, accepting Delta Dental and Cigna" beats "leading provider of dental solutions".
3. Do not block the readers. Check your robots.txt allows GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended, or the file is pointless.

Our free llms.txt generator builds one from your existing pages.

A template you can copy

Start with a top-level heading that is your business name. Under it, a one-paragraph blockquote: what you are, where, since when, for whom, and the one or two facts that distinguish you. Then headed sections. "Services" with a bullet per service, each linking to its page and stating a starting price if you publish one. "Locations" with the cities you serve. "People" with the names and titles of the people customers will deal with. "Proof" with case studies or notable clients you can name. "Guides" with your best educational pages. Finally an "Optional" section for pricing, contact and anything else. Keep the whole thing under a few hundred lines and use plain Markdown links.

llms.txt versus llms-full.txt

The short file is a map: descriptions and links. The full file is the territory: the actual text of your key pages concatenated into one document, so a system can read everything important about you in one request without crawling. Publish both if you can; the short one is the one that matters most, and the full one is a convenience for systems that want depth.

Keeping it accurate

The file is only useful if it is true. Every price, every service, every person listed should match the live site. The easiest way to guarantee that is to generate it from the same database that builds the site, which is how ours works: change a price in the admin and the file updates. If you maintain it by hand, put a quarterly reminder in the calendar and check it after any change to services or team.

Signs it is working

You will not get a report from the assistants. What you can do is watch for changes in how they describe you when you run your prompt set monthly: fewer wrong details, more of the specific attributes you listed, your correct service area. Combined with consistent descriptions elsewhere, that is the shift you are looking for.

Mistakes to avoid

Marketing language instead of facts. Listing services you do not actually offer. Leaving out prices when you publish them elsewhere. Writing it once and forgetting it. Blocking the crawlers that would read it. And treating it as a ranking trick: it is documentation for machines, and it works best as part of the wider habit of describing your business the same way everywhere.