AI search answers
What is llms.txt and do I need one?
Short answer: llms.txt is a plain-text file at the root of your site that states what your business is, gives the canonical facts about it, and points AI systems to your most important pages. It is not a ranking factor and no engine is obliged to read it. It is worth publishing because it removes ambiguity cheaply and takes minutes to maintain.
What goes in it
- What the site is and who operates it, in one paragraph
- The canonical facts: legal name, phone, email, pricing model, service area
- A curated list of your key pages with one sentence describing each
- Anything a model would otherwise have to infer or guess
How it differs from robots.txt and sitemap.xml
robots.txt says who may crawl what. sitemap.xml says which URLs exist and when they changed. llms.txt says what the site means — the summary a model would otherwise have to assemble from scratch. They are complementary, not substitutes, and you should publish all three.
What it will not do
It will not get you cited on its own, it does not override crawler rules, and it does not replace on-page structure. Treat it as the cheapest possible insurance against a model inventing your details.
This site publishes one
You can read ours at /llms.txt, with the expanded version at /llms-full.txt. Every client campaign includes a customized version as part of the AEO foundation.
People also ask
- Do the major engines actually read llms.txt?
- There is no public guarantee that any of them do. It is a low-cost, low-risk file, which is the honest case for publishing it — not a promised ranking effect.
- Where does the file go?
- At the root of the domain, served as plain text: https://yourdomain.com/llms.txt.
Keep reading
Get named by AI instead of your competitor
GEO by MyFast.ai publishes the sourced content, seeds the off-site conversation and scans six engines monthly so you can see exactly where you stand. $1,499/month, no contract.