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Glossary · AI search

llms.txt

Reviewed 31 Oct 2026 By Madiha Fatima 3 min read Check it yourself: yes, free

3 min
Definition

llms.txt is a plain-text file placed at the root of your website, at yoursite.com/llms.txt, that gives AI tools a short guided list of your most important pages with a line on what each one is. It is a proposed convention, not a standard, and no major AI company has confirmed that it uses the file.

Think of it as a sitemap written for a reader rather than a crawler. It costs twenty minutes, does no harm and may help tools that fetch pages on demand. It does not replace robots.txt, an XML sitemap or clear pages, and it will not make an AI recommend you.

Short version: a reading list for AI tools, at /llms.txt.
Why it matters for your business

Cheap to add,
easy to oversell.

For a dental clinic or a law firm, the pages that win a patient are a handful: the service pages, the fees page, the team and the contact details. llms.txt is a way of saying so in one place. If an AI tool does read it, it finds the right pages first instead of a privacy policy and three old news posts. If it does not, you have lost twenty minutes.

What you are being sold: "llms.txt setup" as a paid line item, sometimes as the centrepiece of an "AI SEO" package. It is a text file. Any developer can write it in the time it takes to read this page, and we add it to every site we build without charging for it. Treat a proposal that leans on it as a sign the rest of the GEO work is thin.

What actually gets a business named in AI answers is the content of the pages themselves, the people on them and the mentions elsewhere. The file points. It does not persuade.

Example

A forty-page dental site
and the six pages that matter.

Without the file

A clinic's site has forty pages: eight services, a team page, a fees page, a blog with twenty posts, a privacy policy, a cookie page and a careers page from two years ago. A tool fetching pages on demand lands wherever a link takes it, often the newest blog post.

With the file

At /llms.txt: the clinic's name, one line on what it is and where, then the eight services with a line each, the fees page, the team page and how to book. Twelve lines. A tool that honours it reads those first and quotes the implant page when asked about implants, rather than a post about the holiday opening hours. The team also used the exercise to notice that the fees page was two years out of date.

How to check it on your site

Four checks, all free.

Tick each one as you go. 0 of 4 checked on your site.

  1. Type the address

    Open yoursite.com/llms.txt in a browser. You should see plain text starting with your business name, not a 404 page and not your homepage. If it is missing, that is fine too. Decide whether to add it after reading the rest of this page.

  2. Read it as a stranger

    If the file exists, does every page it lists still exist and still matter? Links to deleted pages or to a blog post from three years ago tell a tool the file is stale. Ten to twenty lines is plenty.

  3. Check it is not doing robots.txt's job

    llms.txt does not block anything. If you want to keep an AI crawler out, that belongs in robots.txt. Open yoursite.com/robots.txt too and make sure the two files agree about what is public.

  4. Look at the pages it points to

    Open the first three pages listed. Each should answer its question in the first lines and carry a named person. A tidy llms.txt pointing at vague pages helps nobody.

Related terms

Usually in the same sentence.

Read next

Where this shows up in practice.

AI search llms.txt explained

The full article: what the file is, what it is not and a copy-and-paste template.

 Technical SEO What technical SEO actually means

Where llms.txt sits among the files and settings that make a site readable to machines.

 Service SEO & AI search

The file is part of the technical setup, never a line item.
Related service

An llms.txt file is part of the technical setup in the SEO & AI search service and of every site we build. It is not a line item and never will be. Prices are on the price list, not on a call.

See the SEO & AI search service
Reviewed by Madiha Fatima, founder of 99creatix

Every entry in this glossary is written and checked by the person who runs the agency, reviewed at least once a quarter and dated. Last reviewed 31 October 2026.

Spotted an error or a term we are missing? Tell us and it is fixed within the week.

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Next step

Want the whole AI-readiness
list, not just the file?

Fifteen minutes with your site. We will check llms.txt, robots.txt, schema and whether your key pages can actually be quoted, and tell you what would need to change, before you decide anything.

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