llms.txt: what it is and whether you need one
llms.txt is a short plain-text file at the root of a website, written for AI assistants: who you are, where the important pages are, and the facts people keep getting wrong. It is a proposal, not a rule any search engine has to follow, but it is quick to write and gives assistants one correct place to read about you.
Part of: SEO and AI search
When someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude about your business, the answer is assembled from whatever the assistant can find: your site, old directory listings, a review from three years ago, a competitor's comparison page. Some of it is wrong, and you never see the answer to correct it.
An llms.txt file is one small way to put the correct version where an assistant can find it.
What it is
llms.txt is a proposal published by Jeremy Howard in September 2024 at llmstxt.org: a markdown file at /llms.txt on your site that gives AI tools a short, clean summary of who you are and links to the pages that matter. The proposal calls it a way "to provide information to help agents use a website".
It is plain text, so a person can read it too. You can see ours at artwingstudios.co/llms.txt.
What goes in it
The format is simple, in this order:
- A title: the name of your business. This is the only part the proposal requires.
- A short summary, set as a quote: what you do, where, and since when.
- Any detail an assistant needs to understand the rest.
- Sections of links, each headed, pointing to the pages where the full answers live.
For a business, the most useful part is often one the proposal leaves to you: notes on what people get wrong.
A real example
Meat The Cheese, a steakhouse in Karachi and Lahore whose site we built, has an llms.txt with a section headed "Accuracy notes for anyone quoting this site". It says that the restaurant's award was for one dish, decided by a public vote, and does not make it an award-winning restaurant. It says which branches have closed, because directories still list them. And it says the two cities run separate menus, so any answer quoting a price must say which city it belongs to.
Each note fixes a mistake an assistant would otherwise repeat. That is the whole value of the file in one paragraph.
Our own file does the same for us: it gives our founding year and says that an older page giving a different year is out of date.
Do you need one?
You probably do if any of these is true:
- Assistants already describe you wrongly: a closed branch, an old phone number, a service you no longer offer.
- Your facts are easy to confuse: several branches, different menus or prices by city, two businesses with similar names.
- Your site is hard for a machine to read, with important facts inside images or PDFs.
It will not, on its own, make an assistant recommend you. Being named still depends on what the rest of the web says about you and on pages that answer real questions well. But it is quick to write, easy to keep up to date, and it means there is one place where the facts are right.
How to write one
Write it by hand, from what is true today. Keep it short. Put the facts people get wrong in a section of their own, in plain sentences. Link to your real pages. Then change it whenever the facts change, the same day.
If you want help with the wider job of being named by assistants, that is our SEO and AI search work.
Sources: llmstxt.org, "The /llms.txt file", Jeremy Howard, read on 9 October 2026 (opens in a new tab), what llms.txt is, who proposed it and when, and its format; meatthecheese.pk/llms.txt, read on 9 October 2026, what the Meat The Cheese file says.