What is llms.txt and does my website need one?

Every few months a new file appears that your website supposedly cannot live without. In 2026 that file is llms.txt. Owners ask us about it after an agency email or a LinkedIn post, usually with the worry that they are missing out on AI traffic. Here is what it is, who reads it, and whether it is worth your time.

What is llms.txt?

llms.txt is a proposal from September 2024 by Jeremy Howard, the founder of the AI research group Answer.AI. The idea is simple. Websites are full of menus, scripts and clutter that make them hard for a language model to digest, so you give the model a clean summary instead. The file sits at the root of your site, like robots.txt does, and it is written in Markdown: a heading with the site name, a one-line description, and short sections listing your most useful pages with a line about each.

A small business version looks like this:

# Studio Kudji

> Solo web design studio in Melbourne. Fast, hand-coded websites
> for small businesses and founders.

## Core pages
- [Pricing](https://www.studiokudji.com.au/#pricing): Essentials $999 fixed; Studio from $2500
- [Guides](https://www.studiokudji.com.au/guides): Plain-English guides on websites, SEO and AI search

That is the whole thing. There is also a longer variant, llms-full.txt, which dumps the full text of your pages into one file. Think of it as a table of contents written for a machine.

Who actually reads it?

This is the part the sales emails skip. As of 2026, none of the major AI companies has said it reads llms.txt. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Perplexity all crawl websites, and all of them read your normal pages. None has published support for the file.

Google has been the most direct. Its documentation on AI Overviews and AI Mode says you do not need any special files or markup, and that being eligible for Google's AI answers is the same as being eligible for ordinary search. In 2025 Google's John Mueller compared llms.txt to the meta keywords tag, the 1990s-era tag that let you type in whatever you wanted to rank for, which search engines stopped trusting for exactly that reason. People who have checked their server logs report the same thing: AI crawlers fetch pages, and almost never the file.

Where llms.txt has found a real use is in software documentation. Developers paste docs into AI assistants, and a clean Markdown version of a docs site genuinely helps there. That is a different job from getting a Melbourne café recommended.

Does my business website need one?

If you run a café, a physio clinic, a trade or a consultancy, no. Nothing about whether an AI recommends you depends on this file. The tools build their answers from what they can read on your pages, from your Google Business Profile, and from reviews and directories. We walk through exactly how that works in Will my business show up in ChatGPT?.

It is reasonable to add one anyway, for two reasons. It costs nothing, and if any AI tool starts using it, you are already there. We added one to our own site for exactly that reason, and you can read it at studiokudji.com.au/llms.txt. It took about ten minutes. That is the right amount of effort to spend on it.

What matters far more

If you want to be the business an AI names, spend the time here instead:

• Put plain text on your pages. Say what you do, who it is for and where, in words a machine can read. A site that is all images or a single PDF gives an AI nothing.
• Fill in your Google Business Profile completely. Categories, services, suburbs, hours, a real description and real photos. Google says it draws on Business Profiles for AI answers about businesses.
• Keep your details identical everywhere. The same name, address and phone number on your site, on Google, on Facebook and in directories.
• Collect genuine reviews. Reviews are how an AI decides you are worth recommending, and what it quotes when it describes you.
• Add structured data. A short block of LocalBusiness markup on your site states your name, address and opening hours in a format every crawler understands. We build this into every site, as part of the SEO foundation.

The red flag

If an agency offers an "AI SEO package" and llms.txt is the headline deliverable, be careful. The file takes minutes. The work that gets a business recommended is the unglamorous part: readable pages, a complete profile, consistent details and reviews. Anyone who leads with the file is selling the easy bit and skipping the hard bit.

The bottom line

llms.txt is a tidy idea that the big AI tools have not adopted. Add one if you like, it is harmless, but do not pay for it and do not expect it to do anything. Showing up in AI search is the same job as showing up in Google, done properly. If you would rather have that done for you, that is what we do.