What is llms.txt, and should your website have one?
A one-page markdown map of your website, written for language models instead of browsers. It's cheap to add and does no harm. It also attracts more hype than evidence, so here is what we know.
The idea
llms.txt is a proposal (llmstxt.org, September 2024) for a plain markdown file at the root of your domain (example.com/llms.txt) that gives language models a curated summary of what your site contains and where the important pages are. Where robots.txt controls access, llms.txt describes content: think of it as a table of contents written for machines with small attention spans.
The format is deliberately simple: a heading, a summary and lists of links.
> Plumbing services for homes and businesses in Oslo: emergency callouts, bathroom renovation, heat pumps. Established 2005, 12 employees.
## Services
- [Emergency plumber](https://example.com/emergency): 24/7 callout in Oslo
- [Bathroom renovation](https://example.com/bathroom): fixed-price projects
## Company
- [About us](https://example.com/about): history, team, certifications
- [Contact](https://example.com/contact): phone, email, address, org.nr
Where it stands (July 2026)
No major AI provider has officially confirmed reading llms.txt. Not OpenAI, not Anthropic, not Google, not Perplexity. Anyone selling llms.txt as a guaranteed visibility boost is ahead of the evidence, and plenty of people are selling it that way.
So why bother? It takes fifteen minutes and can't hurt: no crawler minds an extra text file. Some developer tools and smaller AI agents already read it. And writing one makes you decide, on one page, what your business is and which pages matter. That summary often shows what your website itself doesn't say clearly.
Our audit methodology treats it the same way. llms.txt earns a single bonus point if it's there and costs nothing if it isn't. For a standard the big providers haven't adopted, that's about the right weight.
Almost nobody has one
In our benchmark of 419 Norwegian trade businesses, 9% have an llms.txt. For comparison: 93% have robots.txt and 89% have a sitemap. If the major providers do adopt it, the businesses that already have one start ahead. If they never do, those businesses lost fifteen minutes.
Writing yours in 15 minutes
Start with one sentence a stranger could act on: who you are, what you do, where. Add your services as a link list with a half-line description each, then company pages (about and contact, with your organisation number). Keep it under a page, write it in your customers' language, and update it when your services change. Ours is at appsynth.eu/llms.txt if you want a real example.
One warning. llms.txt doesn't replace anything. If AI can't see your pages because bots are blocked, content needs JavaScript, or there's no structured data, a well-written llms.txt won't change that. Sort out the basics first.
See how your site does on the basics
The free mini-audit runs 5 of our 35 checks on your domain. They're the ones that decide whether AI can read and understand your website at all.