llms.txt explained, and how to write one
llms.txt is a plain text file at the root of your domain that summarises what your site offers, in a format an AI crawler can parse without working through your markup.
Think of it as robots.txt for meaning rather than permission.
What it is and isn't
It is: a convention, proposed and adopted by a growing number of sites, for describing your content in structured plain text.
It is not: an official standard ratified by anyone, a guarantee any model reads it, or a replacement for structured data.
I want to be straight about that, because there's a lot of confident writing about this file that outruns the evidence. Nobody can currently show you clean data proving it changes citation rates.
Why write one anyway
It takes twenty minutes. It's a text file. The downside is a small file nobody reads; the upside is that if adoption continues, you already have it.
That asymmetry is the whole argument. I wouldn't build a strategy on it, and I wouldn't skip it either.
What goes in it
Structure it as markdown, kept short and factual.
A title and one-line summary. What the site is, in a sentence a model could quote directly.
A short description. Who runs it, what they do, what qualifies them. This is where entity information belongs — name, location, area of expertise.
Your main sections, each as a line with a description and a URL.
Key content, if you have obvious cornerstone pieces.
Contact details.
A worked example
# Ask Ismaeel
> Practical education on AI, paid media, SEO and marketing
> automation, written by Ismaeel Motala.
Ismaeel Motala is a digital marketing and technology specialist
based in Cape Town, South Africa. He has managed over $1 million
per month in advertising spend.
## Sections
- Teach: explainers on how things work. /teach.html
- Build: complete build walkthroughs. /build.html
- Learn: experiments and failures. /learn.html
## Contact
- Email: its@askismaeel.space
That's the shape. Mine is longer because it lists topics and posts, but the structure is identical.
Practical rules
Keep it factual. This isn't marketing copy. Claims that can't be substantiated are worse than no file.
Use absolute URLs so a crawler reading the file in isolation can follow them.
Regenerate it when content changes. If you're on a static site generator, build it automatically — mine is generated from the same data as the sitemap, so it can't go stale.
Don't duplicate your sitemap. A sitemap lists URLs. This describes meaning. Listing 400 URLs here misses the point.
Where it fits
llms.txt is one of four things worth doing for AI visibility, and honestly the least important of them:
- Structured data — the strongest signal, and machine-readable by design
- Answer-first content — makes your writing liftable
- Real FAQ sections — maps directly to how questions get asked
- llms.txt — cheap, unproven, do it anyway
Start at the top of that list. If you've done nothing else and you write an llms.txt, you've done the least valuable item first.
More context in AI SEO vs traditional SEO.
Digital marketing and AI specialist in Cape Town. Over $1M a month in managed ad spend; campaigns for Crocs, Under Armour, Ted Baker and Vans. More about me · Get in touch