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

Advice on "SEO for AI" often mentions a file called llms.txt, presented as the way to get ChatGPT to read your site. Below is what it is, what it looks like, what Google and the 2026 data say, and whether it's worth doing for a small business website.

What llms.txt is

llms.txt is a proposal published on 3 September 2024 by Jeremy Howard, co-founder of Answer.AI. The idea: an AI model looking for information on a site has to wade through long HTML pages full of menus, ads and scripts. A short file at a fixed address (/llms.txt) would hand it what matters: what the site is and where the key pages are, ideally in clean Markdown versions.

The format is plain Markdown:

1. an H1 heading with the site's name, the only required part;
2. a short summary as a blockquote;
3. optionally, a few paragraphs of context;
4. H2 sections with lists of links, each with a short note;
5. optionally, an "Optional" section for less important links.

What it looks like

For a coffee shop, an llms.txt might look like this:

# Example Coffee

> Specialty coffee shop at 10 Example Street, Austin.
> Open daily 7am–7pm. Coffee, house-made pastries, breakfast.

## Pages

- [Menu](https://examplecoffee.com/menu): drinks and prices, updated monthly
- [Hours and location](https://examplecoffee.com/visit): map, parking, phone
- [Events](https://examplecoffee.com/events): tastings and workshops

## Optional

- [About us](https://examplecoffee.com/about): the shop's story

Do ChatGPT, Google or Claude use it?

In short: there's no evidence that the major AI assistants rely on it.

• Google says in its documentation for AI features that you don't need to create new machine-readable files, AI text files or special markup to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. In 2025, Google's Gary Illyes said Google doesn't use llms.txt.
• OpenAI explains in its crawler documentation how to control its bots through robots.txt; llms.txt isn't mentioned.
• Server logs tell the same story. A study of 83 sites over 12 weeks in 2026 counted:

The one exception in the study was Meta's crawler, which fetched the file more often. The authors' conclusion: the data doesn't support treating llms.txt as a reliable channel to any particular engine.

Where it is useful

llms.txt caught on where it was first aimed: technical documentation. Anthropic, Stripe, Vercel and Cloudflare publish llms.txt files for their docs. Developers hand those files to the AI coding tools they work with, so the tools read the right documentation. There, a person asks for the file explicitly; it isn't a crawler discovering it on its own.

llms.txt, robots.txt and sitemaps

The first two matter for every site. If an AI search crawler is blocked in robots.txt, no llms.txt will get you into its answers. How to check: How to show up in ChatGPT and AI Overviews.

Is it worth making one?

For a small business site, llms.txt is optional. It does no harm and takes half an hour, but the right order is different:

1. The site is indexed in Google and Bing: Why is my website not showing up on Google.
2. robots.txt doesn't block AI search crawlers (OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot).
3. Every service page opens with the answer: what you do, where, at what price.
4. Important information is text, not images: the menu, prices, hours.
5. Your Google Business Profile and reviews are up to date: How to get Google reviews.
6. Then, if you like, llms.txt.

How to make one

1. Write the file in the format above: the name, a two-line summary, links to the key pages.
2. Put it at the root of the site so it opens at yoursite.com/llms.txt.
3. Keep it in step with your pages: a file that gives different hours from the site does more harm than not having one.
4. If your site is generated from code, the file can be generated from the same data as the pages, so it never falls behind.

On manvro.com we have an llms.txt generated from the same data as the pages, so it changes when the site does. On the sites we build on our web design page, the list above comes first: indexed pages, clear text, structured data and a sitemap. Which structured data a local business needs is in our schema markup guide.