llms.txt is a plain-text file at your site's root that tells AI systems, in one page, what your business is and which pages matter. Think “robots.txt for AI” — except instead of telling crawlers what to avoid, it actively guides them to what you want read and cited. It takes about ten minutes to create. Whether you need one deserves an honest answer, because most of what's written about it is either hype or dismissal.
What it looks like
A markdown file at yourbusiness.co.uk/llms.txt: a one-line summary of the business, a short plain-English description, then a linked list of your most important pages with a sentence on each — services, areas, credentials, contact. No code, no tooling; a text file. You can read ours right now, which is the fastest way to understand the format.
The honest status: emerging, not universal
llms.txt is a proposed standard, not a ratified one. Adoption among the major AI companies is uneven and shifting, and nobody serious can promise that every engine reads the file on every crawl today. Anyone selling llms.txt as a guaranteed citation switch is overclaiming. So why bother? Three reasons:
- It's the cheapest insurance on the web. Ten minutes, zero risk, and if adoption tips the way robots.txt and sitemaps did, sites that already have one start ahead.
- It forces clarity you need anyway. Writing one makes you state, in machine-plain language, what you do, where, and why you're credible — the same clarity every AI signal depends on. Businesses that can't fill in llms.txt usually have the same gap in their pages.
- Some crawlers and tools read it now — and the cost of being wrong about the rest is nil. Compare that with the cost of a competitor having one when adoption tips.
What it won't do
It won't compensate for a site AI can't read: blocked crawlers, missing structured data, pages that describe rather than answer. llms.txt is a map — if the destinations are empty, the map changes nothing. It sits last in the fix order, after crawler access, schema and answer-first content. (Our guide to the seven reasons AI skips your business covers that order.)
How to get one
Write it yourself — summary, description, linked page list, markdown — or let us do it: the free check tells you whether you have one today, and the £5 technical report generates a ready-to-upload llms.txt written from your actual site content, alongside the schema templates and the full fix-list. Upload it to your site root, and you've done the ten-minute job properly.