AI
llms.txt
llms.txt is a proposed convention: a plain-text file at the root of a site that gives language models a curated, markdown-linked map of its most useful content.
It is not an official standard and no major model provider has committed to reading it, which makes claims about its ranking effect unfounded. What it does reliably is make a site cheap to read for any agent that fetches it.
The stronger sibling practice is offering markdown versions of individual pages, which removes the parsing cost of extracting content from application HTML.
In practice
Publish it if you have genuinely structured reference content worth pointing at. Do not expect it to substitute for being described accurately elsewhere.
Common questions
- Does llms.txt improve AI rankings?
- There is no evidence that it does. It makes content easier for an agent to consume, which is a different and more modest claim.