What Is llms.txt, and What Should Actually Go In It?
llms.txt is a plain text file, written in simple Markdown, that you place at yourdomain.com/llms.txt. It's a short, clean summary of who you are and what your key pages contain, written specifically so an AI model can read it without wading through navigation menus, cookie banners, and JavaScript your website's human visitors never notice.
Brands including Anthropic, Stripe, and Cloudflare already publish one. It's quickly becoming a baseline signal in AI optimisation.
Why your website is harder for AI to read than it looks
A modern web page is mostly not content. Menus, footers, ads, and styling code dominate the raw file. The actual substance is often buried inside it. Worse, a lot of that content only appears after JavaScript runs in a browser and many AI crawlers don't run JavaScript at all, so they see an empty page where a human sees a fully loaded site. llms.txt sidesteps all of that: it's one clean document, entirely under your control, with none of that noise.
What actually belongs in the file
A single H1 heading with your brand or project name. This is the only required element.
A one-line summary directly underneath, in a blockquote, describing what you do in plain language. Avoid marketing fluff and jargon, just the facts a model needs to describe you accurately.
A short list of your most important pages, each with a one-line description of what it covers. Think of this as a curated table of contents, not a full sitemap.
Optional context sections, additional information unique to you, pricing, key differentiators, notable clients, make sure it’s brief and factual.
What to leave out
Don't paste your entire site into this file. It isn't a backup of your content, it's a map to the content that matters most. Avoid marketing language that reads well to a human but tells a model nothing concrete ("industry-leading," "world-class"). Models trust specifics, not adjectives.
A simple way to start
Write it as if you were explaining your business to a smart colleague who has never heard of you and has thirty seconds to understand it. Save it as a plain text file, upload it to your site's root directory (your web developer or hosting provider can help with this in minutes), and check that it loads at yourdomain.com/llms.txt.
Set a baseline before you publish
Before you publish, run the three-question test from the first article in this series and note how AI models currently describe you. Then check again in 60–90 days. llms.txt is a small, low-cost signal. It won't transform your visibility overnight but it removes friction that's otherwise working against you every time a model tries to understand your site.
