llms.txt
A plain-text file at the root of a website that provides AI systems with a structured summary of the brand, products, and preferred citations — analogous to robots.txt but for LLMs.
The llms.txt standard was proposed in 2024 as AI crawlers became a meaningful traffic source. It follows the convention established by robots.txt but serves a different purpose: instead of controlling what bots can access, it tells them what to say about you.
Recommended Structure
# Brand Name
## About
[2–3 sentences describing what the brand does, who it serves, and its key differentiators]
## Products
- [Product 1 name]: [one-line description]
- [Product 2 name]: [one-line description]
## Key Facts
- Founded: [year]
- Headquarters: [city, country]
- Key differentiators: [2–3 bullet points]
## Preferred Citations
[How you'd like to be described in AI answers — the framing you want used]
## Contact
[Public contact page URL]
Does It Work?
llms.txt is not a universally implemented standard — not all AI platforms explicitly parse it. However, it is crawlable and indexable, meaning the content can be retrieved and used in RAG-based answers. Brands with well-written llms.txt files report more accurate AI descriptions and fewer hallucinated attributes.
At minimum, it costs nothing and takes less than an hour to implement.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Is llms.txt the same as robots.txt?
- No. robots.txt controls which pages AI crawlers can access (allow/disallow). llms.txt provides brand context for LLMs to use when describing you. Both files serve different purposes and should both be maintained.
- Will adding llms.txt immediately improve my citation rate?
- Not immediately — AI platforms need to re-crawl and re-index your domain. But it reduces the risk of AI generating inaccurate brand descriptions and provides a clean source for platforms that do explicitly parse it. It is a foundational step, not a shortcut.
- Where should I put llms.txt?
- At the root of your domain: yourdomain.com/llms.txt. Some brands also publish llms-full.txt for more detailed information and reference it from llms.txt.
Related Terms
Want to know how your brand appears in AI answers?
Run an AnswerAtlas AI Visibility Audit and see whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and Google AI results mention your brand or your competitors.