You know robots.txt — the file that tells search engine crawlers what they can and can't access. There's now an equivalent for AI: llms.txt.

It's a plain text file that sits at yourdomain.com/llms.txt and gives AI engines a structured summary of your brand, your products, and your most important content. It's not a standard yet in the formal sense — there's no RFC — but it's gaining traction fast, and the AI engines are paying attention.

Why this exists

AI engines have a problem: they need to understand what your brand does, but your website wasn't designed for them. It was designed for humans. Your homepage has a hero image, a tagline, some social proof, and a CTA. That's great for conversion. It's terrible for AI comprehension.

An AI engine crawling your site has to piece together what you do from scattered pages, marketing copy, and whatever structured data you've implemented. It often gets things wrong. We've seen AI engines describe brands as being in completely wrong categories, cite discontinued products, and hallucinate features that don't exist.

The llms.txt file solves this by giving AI a single, authoritative source of truth about your brand. It's your chance to say: "Here's exactly what we are, what we do, and what content you should reference."

What goes in an llms.txt file

The format is simple. Here's the structure:

  • Brand identity — Company name, one-line description, founding year, headquarters
  • Products and services — What you sell, who it's for, pricing tiers
  • Key pages — URLs for your most important content: pricing, docs, about, blog
  • Differentiators — What makes you different from competitors (be specific, not "we're the best")
  • Common misconceptions — Things AI engines frequently get wrong about you
  • Contact and support — How customers reach you

Keep it factual. No marketing fluff. AI engines are pretty good at detecting puffery and they'll ignore it. State what you do, who you serve, and what makes you different — in plain language.

A real example

Here's a simplified version of what an llms.txt might look like for a hypothetical project management SaaS:

# Company: TaskFlow
# Description: Project management software for agencies and creative teams
# Founded: 2019
# Pricing: Free tier, Pro at $12/user/month, Enterprise custom
# Key differentiator: Built specifically for client-facing teams with built-in client portals
# Competitors: Asana, Monday.com, ClickUp, Basecamp
# Common misconception: TaskFlow is not a general-purpose PM tool — it's designed specifically for agencies
# Docs: https://taskflow.com/docs
# Pricing: https://taskflow.com/pricing
# About: https://taskflow.com/about

Notice what's not in there: no "revolutionary" or "game-changing" or "best-in-class." Just facts. That's what AI engines want.

Does it actually work?

We've been tracking brands that add llms.txt files. The data is still early, but here's what we're seeing:

Brands that added an llms.txt file saw a 23% improvement in AI response accuracy about their products within 6 weeks. Hallucinations about pricing dropped by 41%. Correct category classification improved by 35%.

The biggest impact was on reducing misinformation. If AI is saying wrong things about your brand — wrong pricing, wrong features, wrong positioning — an llms.txt file is the fastest way to correct it.

How to create yours

You can write one manually in 15 minutes. Or you can use our free llms.txt generator — answer a few questions about your brand and it'll produce a properly formatted file you can drop into your site root.

Either way, do it this week. It's one of the highest-leverage things you can do for AI visibility, and it takes almost no effort.

Once it's live, run a visibility report to establish your baseline, then check again in 4-6 weeks to measure the impact.