What is llms.txt, and does your site need one?

Who actually reads llms.txt?

Almost no one. Ahrefs looked at 137,210 sites in its web analytics data in May 2026. About 38,000 of them had an llms.txt file. 97% of those files got no requests at all that month. [3]

Of the requests that did come, 96% were from bots. The named AI bot that fetched llms.txt most was GPTBot, OpenAI’s training crawler. Claude Code, Anthropic’s coding agent, fetched it more than any AI search bot. [3]

Ahrefs says its customers are more technical than most site owners. So it treats the 28% of sites that had the file as an upper bound for the web at large. [3]

What do Google and the AI companies say?

Google is direct about it. You do not need machine-readable files, AI text files, markup or Markdown to appear in Google Search or its AI features, because Google Search does not use them. Making an llms.txt for other services is fine, and Google says it will neither help nor harm your site in Google Search. [2]

OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s crawler guides do not ask sites for an llms.txt. Both point to robots.txt instead. Both companies do publish one for their own developer docs: OpenAI’s llms.txt and Anthropic’s llms.txt. [4][5][6][7]

Does llms.txt help SEO?

No. Google says the file will neither help nor harm your visibility or rankings in Google Search. It sits next to your pages and changes nothing about them. [2]

Why we still make one

Our own site has an llms.txt. It costs nothing to keep and carries no risk. A few AI tools do fetch it, coding agents above all, according to the Ahrefs data. [3]

Our free check marks llms.txt as optional and never counts a missing file among your top problems. If your time is short, spend it elsewhere first. Make sure AI crawlers are not blocked in robots.txt, and answer your customers’ questions in plain words on your pages.

For what does move AI answers, start with the AI search optimization guide, then how to get your business recommended by ChatGPT and GEO vs SEO.

How do you write an llms.txt file?

Keep it short and true. The proposal at llmstxt.org asks for these parts, in this order. [1]

1. A heading line (# in Markdown) with the name of your site or business. It is the only required part.
2. A short summary in a blockquote (>): what you do, for whom, and where.
3. Optional paragraphs with key facts, like your hours or the areas you serve.
4. Sections under smaller headings (##) that list your most useful pages, each as a Markdown link with a short note.
5. If you like, a last section called “Optional” for pages an AI tool can skip when it is short on space.

# Example Dental

> Family dental clinic in Austin, Texas. Open Saturdays. Most insurance accepted.

## Services
- [Teeth cleaning](https://www.example.com/cleaning): checkups and cleaning for adults and children
- [Emergency care](https://www.example.com/emergency): same-day visits for pain or a broken tooth

## Optional
- [About us](https://www.example.com/about): the team and the clinic

Save it as llms.txt at the root of your site, so it opens at yoursite.com/llms.txt. Keep it in line with your pages. A file that says one thing while your site says another helps nobody.

The proposal also suggests clean Markdown copies of key pages, at the same address with .md added. Some sites publish llms-full.txt, a longer file with the full text of their pages. That is a common habit, but the proposal does not mention it. [1]

How do you check if a site has one?

Add /llms.txt to the address, for example example.com/llms.txt. If you see text, the file exists. If you see a “page not found” error, it does not. Our free check looks for it too, and labels it optional.