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llms.txt — Definition

llms.txt

TL;DR: llms.txt is a proposed standard — a markdown file at your site root that gives AI systems a curated map of your most important pages. It’s advisory: it helps AI understand your site, but it doesn’t control access.

What it means

llms.txt is a file you place at https://yoursite.com/llms.txt containing a curated, markdown-formatted summary of your site — your key pages, what they cover, and links to clean versions of the content. The idea, proposed in 2024, is to give large language models a concise, high-signal map instead of forcing them to infer structure from messy HTML. It’s loosely analogous to a sitemap, but written for AI comprehension rather than search-engine crawling, and it lists what matters rather than every URL.

Why it matters

llms.txt is easy to confuse with an access-control tool — it is not one. It carries the same honor-system limitation as robots.txt: an AI system can read it, ignore it, or never fetch it, and adoption across the major AI engines is inconsistent. So treat it as a comprehension aid for cooperative AI, not a lock. It can help AI represent your site accurately; it cannot keep any bot out. For keeping bots out, you need robots.txt plus a firewall (see glossary/waf and seo/ai-crawler-access).

How it works / examples

A minimal llms.txt is a markdown file like:

# Primores
> Practical AI for marketing, SEO, and automation.


## Key pages
- [AI crawler access control](https://primores.org/wiki/seo/ai-crawler-access): which bots to allow or block
- [AI visibility](https://primores.org/wiki/seo/ai-visibility): getting found in AI answers

Some platforms (and SEO plugins) auto-generate one. A companion llms-full.txt can hold the full expanded content.

Sources