llms.txt is a plain-text file that sits at your website’s front door and gives AI systems a clean, structured summary of who you are and what your pages contain. Think of it as the one-page briefing you’d hand a new assistant: here’s the business, here’s what matters, here’s where everything lives. Ours is at moonlinemktg.com/llms.txt — practicing what we’re about to preach.
The Problem It Solves
Websites are built for human eyes: menus, images, animations, popups. An AI system reading your site has to dig your actual facts out of all that presentation — and digging is where mistakes and omissions happen. llms.txt strips the presentation away: a short description of the business, the key facts stated plainly, and an annotated list of your important pages. It follows the same logic as robots.txt (the decades-old file that instructs search crawlers), but where robots.txt says what crawlers may read, llms.txt helps AI systems understand what they read.
What Goes In One
- A summary paragraph — who you are, what you do, where, for whom. Written in plain declarative sentences an AI can quote without interpretation.
- Key facts — services, coverage area, the essentials a customer would ask about, stated as simple bullet points.
- A guided page list — your important pages with a line each on what they contain, so a system fetching your site knows where the answers live.
- Contact details — the same phone, email, and location as everywhere else. Consistency is the currency.
What to Expect — and What Not To
Two things to keep straight. First, llms.txt is an emerging convention, not an enforced standard — AI companies don’t commit to reading it, and no one should sell it to you as a magic placement button. Second, it’s cheap insurance with no downside: a small, accurate file that makes your business easier to understand can only help systems whose whole recommendation logic runs on confidence. It belongs in the same category as clean page structure and machine-readable labels — the courtesy signals that, together, make you the easy business to name.
Should Your Site Have One?
If customers research you before buying — yes, on the same reasoning you keep your Google profile current. It takes an afternoon, costs nothing to maintain beyond honesty (update it when your facts change, or it becomes one more conflicting source), and signals to every machine reader that your site expects them. It’s one small piece of the larger job of making your business machine-readable end to end — the rest is covered in schema markup and AI SEO more broadly — but it’s the piece you can ship this week.