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llms.txt
A proposed plain-text file that would point AI systems at a site's most important content. As of mid-2026 no major engine honors it, so it earns no citations.
By Shimon Carroll, Founder, SEO for AI Agents · Last updated
llms.txt is a file format proposed by Jeremy Howard in September 2024. The idea is a Markdown file at the site root that lists the pages an LLM should read, in the way robots.txt lists what crawlers may fetch. It is a thoughtful proposal, and that is exactly why it is dangerous: it sounds like it should work.
It does not, yet. Google's Gary Illyes stated publicly, at Search Central Live in 2025, that Google does not use llms.txt. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity have made no public commitment to honor it as of mid-2026. There is no evidence that publishing one changes whether you are cited. An audit tool that scores you down for lacking an llms.txt is selling a signal that does nothing, and we refuse to do that.
The honest position is that llms.txt is a standard waiting for adoption that may or may not come. Watching it costs nothing. Shipping one is harmless but inert. Paying for it, or reorganizing your content strategy around it, is a mistake. The things that actually earn AI citations are render-parity (so crawlers can read your raw HTML), passage structure, schema, and entity corroboration. Spend the effort there.
Related terms
Primary sources
- Jeremy Howard, the /llms.txt proposal
llmstxt.org
- Search Engine Roundtable, Google does not use llms.txt (Illyes)
Search Engine Roundtable