Everything you should know about LLMs.txt

If you’ve been following AI and digital trends, you might’ve come across LLMs.txt, a new proposed open standard that helps websites communicate better with large language models like ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity.

It’s not another technical protocol or SEO trick. It’s a practical, human-readable way to help AI systems understand your site correctly by pointing them to the right, authoritative content.

Let’s go through what it is, why it matters, and how you can set one up for your website.

What is an LLMs.txt?

An LLMs.txt file is a small, Markdown-formatted text file that lives at the root of your website (for example, yourwebsite.com/llms.txt).

It’s designed to help AI systems, known as large language models (LLMs), quickly find the most relevant, LLM-friendly resources about your site.

Instead of crawling and guessing what’s important, an LLM can read your LLMs.txt file to understand:

• What your website or project is about
• Which pages are the most reliable for summarization or citation
• Where to find structured, clean text (like Markdown or documentation)

In short: LLMs.txt is a guide, not a gatekeeper.

It doesn’t block or allow access, it simply organizes your best resources for AI systems to understand and represent your brand more accurately.

Why LLMs.txt matters

AI tools are becoming the new way people discover information. Instead of typing a query into Google, users ask questions directly to ChatGPT, Perplexity, or other AI systems and those tools build their answers by referencing data from across the web.

For brands and content creators, that raises two big challenges:

1. Representation — Is AI accurately summarizing your product or company?
2. Attribution — Is the AI linking back to your official sources?

That’s where LLMs.txt fits in. It gives you a direct way to tell these AI systems:

“Here’s what our site is about, and here are the key resources you should reference.”

It’s a small but meaningful step toward AI visibility, the next frontier after SEO.

And that’s exactly where tools like Geosaur come in, helping teams monitor how their content appears and performs across AI platforms.

How to check if your site has an LLMs.txt

It’s simple:

1. Open your browser and go to yourwebsite.com/llms.txt.
2. If you see a text file with a title, short summary, and links — your site already has one.
3. If you get a 404 page, your site doesn’t have an LLMs.txt yet.

You can ask your SEO, content, or development team to add it, it’s just a single text file that lives in your site’s root directory (the same place as robots.txt).

Once added, it becomes instantly accessible to AI crawlers and tools. You can check our llms.txt from here: geosaur.com/llms.txt

What’s the difference between Robots.txt and LLMs.txt?

This is where many people get confused.

Robots.txt and LLMs.txt sound similar, but they serve completely different purposes:

In short:

• Robots.txt = control and permissions
• LLMs.txt = context and curation

They can exist side by side and in fact, most modern websites will need both.

How to Create an LLMs.txt File

Creating an LLMs.txt is straightforward, but it’s important to structure it correctly. Unlike robots.txt, this file doesn’t use commands like “Allow” or “Disallow.” It’s written in Markdown, designed to be easy for both humans and AI to read.

Here’s the basic format:

A few key points to note:

• Start with an H1 title (#) — your site or project name.
• Add a short summary in a blockquote (>).
• Include relevant sections (like Docs, Policies, etc.) with Markdown links.
• Where possible, link to .md (Markdown) versions of your pages — they’re cleaner and easier for LLMs to read.
• Don’t overthink it. The goal is to make your site’s key information discoverable and clear.

The official reference and examples live at llmstxt.org, which is worth reviewing before publishing your own version.

Who should create llms.txt

If you manage the website, you can create and upload it yourself. If not, this typically falls under the SEO or web development team. It’s not a complex technical change, just a text file at the root of your domain. Once added, it becomes instantly available for AI systems to read.

Tools and integrations:

There are now several tools and plugins that make it easy to add the LLMs.txt specification to your existing workflow:

• llms_txt2ctx - CLI and Python module for parsing llms.txt files and generating LLM context
• JavaScript Implementation - Sample JavaScript implementation
• vitepress-plugin-llms - VitePress plugin that automatically generates LLM-friendly documentation for the website following the llms.txt specification
• docusaurus-plugin-llms - Docusaurus plugin for generating LLM-friendly documentation following the llmtxt.org standard
• Drupal LLM Support - A Drupal Recipe providing full support for the llms.txt proposal on any Drupal 10.3+ site
• llms-txt-php - A library for writing and reading llms.txt Markdown files

The future of AI content governance

LLMs.txt is an early but important step toward more transparent and responsible use of web content by AI systems.

As more companies, publishers, and AI models adopt it, we’ll likely see it become a standard part of digital infrastructure, just like robots.txt or sitemap.xml did years ago.

It’s not a complete solution for content usage or copyright, but it’s a simple, open, and forward-looking way to make sure your site is represented correctly in AI-driven search.

Final thoughts

If you haven’t checked your site’s LLMs.txt yet, do it today:

➡️ Go to yourwebsite.com/llms.txt

If it’s missing, you can create one in minutes. It’s a small effort that helps AI systems understand your site better and helps your brand show up more accurately across AI-powered platforms.

And as you start thinking about your AI visibility, tools like Geosaur can help you track how your content is interpreted and surfaced by different models and answer engines.