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Definition

llms.txt

llms.txt is a plain-text file at yoursite.com/llms.txt that gives AI systems a curated map of a site's most important pages, distinct from robots.txt, which only controls what a crawler is allowed to fetch, not what actually matters once it gets there.

It is not a sitemap. A sitemap lists every URL; llms.txt is a short, curated, human-written summary of the pages that matter and one line on what each one covers, written for an AI system trying to answer a question about the business rather than for a search engine deciding what to crawl.

The standard is still early

Not every AI crawler reads it yet, and adoption is uneven across platforms. That is the actual argument for having one now: the group of businesses that maintain one today is small, and it needs to stay accurate, a stale or wrong llms.txt is worse than none, because it is one of the places a model now goes to check what is true about you.

Read the full llms.txt guide →
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Related terms
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
Related reading
EducationWhat Is llms.txt, and Does Your Site Need One?robots.txt tells search engines what they can crawl. llms.txt does something different: it tells AI systems what actually matters. Here is what the standard is, what a real one looks like, and whether your site needs one yet.
Last updated 29 August 2026