What Is an llms.txt File, and Does My Business Need One?
What is an llms.txt file?
It is a plain text file that sits on your website and describes your business in simple language, written for machines rather than for visitors.
The idea is straightforward. Your website is built for people, so it is full of navigation, images, formatting, and marketing arrangement. An llms.txt file strips all that away and states the facts: what the company is, who it serves, what it sells, what it costs, how to get in touch, and which pages matter. No design, no persuasion, just the summary.
It lives at yourdomain.com/llms.txt, the same way a robots.txt file does. You can go look at anybody's.
Does my business actually need one?
Here is the honest answer, and I would rather give you that than a sales pitch.
Nobody has proven it works.
It is a proposed convention that emerged in the last couple of years, not an official standard. The major AI companies have not published clear statements confirming they read it or weight it. Anyone telling you an llms.txt file will get your business into AI answers is telling you something they cannot possibly know.
So why do we have one on our site, and why am I writing about it?
Three reasons.
It costs about an hour. The downside is an hour and a file nobody notices. That is a genuinely cheap bet.
It cannot hurt. It is a plain, accurate description of your business sitting on your own domain. There is no version of the future where having stated the truth clearly about yourself works against you.
The exercise is worth more than the file. This is the real reason. Writing an llms.txt file forces you to state, in about a page, exactly what your business is and who it is for, with no room to hide behind adjectives. Most owners have never done that. Almost everybody who does it finds a sentence worth putting on the actual website.
What goes in it?
Ours is about a page and runs roughly like this.
A one-paragraph summary at the top. What the company is, what it does, since when, and where it works.
Who we are best for, stated plainly, plus the typical kinds of customers we serve.
Who we are not for. Yes, that goes in too. Same reason it goes on the site.
A one-line category. If a machine had to file us under something, this is the sentence we would want it to use.
Key facts. Founding year, pricing, guarantees, what we do not do, typical timelines, who does what on the team, phone and email.
A short list of important pages with a line describing each.
Write it the way you would explain the business to a new employee on their first morning. No adjectives you cannot back up, no phrases that would need the rest of the website to make sense.
What it will not do
It will not get you into AI answers on its own, and anybody who says otherwise is guessing.
It also will not fix a website that does not say what you do. The file is a summary, and a summary of something vague is just a shorter vague thing. Get the site right first. The words on your pages are still where nearly all of the work happens.
Treat this as the last five percent, done because it is cheap and because writing it will sharpen everything else. That is the whole honest case for it.
Frequently asked questions
Where exactly does the file go?
In the root of your site, so it is reachable at yourdomain.com/llms.txt. Your web company can place it in a few minutes.
Does it need to be updated?
Whenever your prices, services, or contact information change. Put it on the same list as your Google Business Profile, which most people also forget.
Is this the same as robots.txt?
No. Robots.txt tells crawlers where they may and may not go. This is a description of your business, meant to be read rather than obeyed.
Will having one hurt my search rankings?
No. It is a plain file at a separate address and it does not affect how your pages are indexed.
Can I just copy another company's?
Copy the structure, not the content. The entire value is in the specificity, and a borrowed description describes somebody else.
Do you set these up for clients?
We do, as part of the behind the scenes work on a build or a rework. Call 979-217-1544 or email [email protected] and we will tell you whether it is worth doing for your situation yet.
Tom Bruch has built websites since 1998 and is the owner of Aggieland Website Design.