llms.txt

llms.txt is an emerging proposed standard: a Markdown file placed at the root of a website (for example, /llms.txt) that gives large language models a concise, curated map of the site's most important content. Where robots.txt tells crawlers what they may or may not access, llms.txt goes further by highlighting and summarizing the pages a model should prioritize when reasoning about the site (documentation, key product pages, policies, and authoritative explainers) often with links and short descriptions in clean, easily parsed text. Adoption is still early and not universally honored. Importantly, Google has stated plainly that it does not use llms.txt: in its guide to optimizing for generative AI search, Google says you don't need to create new machine-readable files, AI text files, or special markup to appear in Google Search or its generative AI features, because Search itself doesn't use them, and that maintaining an llms.txt for other services neither helps nor harms your Google rankings, since Google simply ignores it. In other words, treat llms.txt as a low-cost, optional signal aimed at the other AI systems and tools that do consume it, not as a Google ranking tactic. Solid crawlability, clean HTML, and structured data remain the dependable fundamentals.