llms.txt: what it really does (and what it doesn’t)

The llms.txt file is a Markdown summary of your site, meant for language models. In 2026, AI robots almost never read it and Google does not support it: it will not get you cited by ChatGPT. Publish one if it is easy, but focus your efforts elsewhere.

This article is part of our GEO guide.

What is the llms.txt file?

llms.txt is a format proposal published in 2024 on llmstxt.org. The idea: put a Markdown text file at the root of the site that presents it in a few lines and lists its most useful pages, so a language model can find the essentials without crawling all the HTML.

An llms.txt file looks like this:

# Smith Plumbing

> Plumbing business in Boston: emergency repairs within 2 hours, 7 days a week, free quotes.

## Main pages

- [Emergency repairs](https://smith-plumbing.com/emergency): lead times, area, prices
- [Pricing](https://smith-plumbing.com/pricing): prices of common jobs
- [FAQ](https://smith-plumbing.com/faq): frequently asked questions

There is also a variant, llms-full.txt, which contains the full text of the pages.

Do AI robots really read llms.txt?

Not really. Several server log analyses show that AI robots almost never request this file, and Google has said it does not support it (Wix, Geoly).

To cite you, ChatGPT relies on what it finds by searching the web, largely through Bing’s index, and on the pages its robots can read (Yoast). An llms.txt replaces none of these steps.

So why publish one?

Three good, modest reasons:

• It costs almost nothing. Ten minutes of writing, one static file.
• It forces you to sum up your business in one sentence, which is useful everywhere else: homepage, directories, profiles.
• Some developer tools read it, for instance coding assistants given the address of a documentation site.

And one bad reason: hoping it will make you appear in ChatGPT. That is not the case today.

How to write an llms.txt in 10 minutes?

1. A title: your business name, preceded by #.
2. A quote: your one-line description, preceded by >. The same as on your site and profiles.
3. A list of links to your 5 to 10 most useful pages, each with a short description.
4. Publish the file at the root: https://yoursite.com/llms.txt, served as plain text.

At TadaSEO, we publish ours: it presents the tool, pricing, ChatGPT tracking and the GEO guide.

What really matters instead?

If you have one hour to spend on GEO, here is where it will help more than an llms.txt:

1. Check that AI robots can read your site with our robots.txt checker. A blocked robot cancels everything else.
2. Check your indexing in Bing, which ChatGPT relies on heavily.
3. Rewrite the opening of your main pages so the answer fits in the first two sentences, with precise facts: prices, lead times, area.
4. Add Organization or LocalBusiness structured data on the homepage.
5. Measure: ask ChatGPT the same questions every week, as TadaSEO’s ChatGPT tracking does.

TadaSEO’s free audit flags a missing llms.txt as information, never as a critical issue: that is the right place for this file today.

Sources

• Wix, llms.txt myths
• Geoly, does llms.txt work?
• Yoast, ChatGPT Search and Bing
• Specification: llmstxt.org