Your website was written for two audiences: people and Google. There is now a third one. AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity read the web to answer questions, and a growing share of your future customers ask them first.
llms.txt is a proposed standard for making that reading easy. It is a single markdown file that lives at yoursite.com/llms.txt and gives an AI a clean summary of your business: who you are, what you offer, and where the details live. Think of it as the elevator pitch you hand a machine.
What goes in it
The format is deliberately simple. A heading with your business name, a one-paragraph summary, then sections of links with short descriptions:
- Your services, each with a one-line description and a link
- Your proof: case studies, results, anything checkable
- How to reach you
Ours is live at enzzero.com/llms.txt if you want a working example to copy the shape of. It lists our services, our case studies with the real numbers, and how to book a consultation. Nothing in it is new content; it is the site, condensed for a reader that wants facts fast.
What it is not
Honesty matters here, because llms.txt gets oversold. It is a proposed standard, not an official one. Adoption by the big AI companies is uneven and mostly unannounced, and nobody can promise you that adding the file will change how often you get cited tomorrow.
So why bother? Three reasons:
- It costs almost nothing. One text file, written once, updated when your services change.
- The downside is zero and the upside is real. Tools that do read it get your best, most accurate summary instead of whatever they manage to scrape.
- Writing it forces clarity. If you cannot summarize your business in one page of plain statements, that is a problem worth finding out about.
It is the same bet as good structured data: make your site easy to read for machines, and every machine that cares benefits.
How to add one
- Open a text editor and write one paragraph: who you are, where you are, what you do, for whom.
- List your core pages as markdown links, each with a one-sentence description. Services first, proof second, contact last.
- State your real numbers where you have them. Specific, checkable facts are what AI answers quote.
- Save it as llms.txt and put it at the root of your site, next to robots.txt.
- Update it when your offering changes, same as you would your homepage.
While you are at it, check your robots.txt. If it blocks AI crawlers wholesale, assistants cannot read your site at all, and no llms.txt will fix that. Allowing them is a business decision, but for most small businesses, being readable is being findable.
FAQ
Is llms.txt the same as robots.txt? No. robots.txt tells crawlers what they may access. llms.txt tells AI readers what your site actually contains. They sit side by side and do different jobs.
Will llms.txt improve my Google ranking? No, and anyone promising that is guessing. It targets AI assistants, not the classic search index. Your Google ranking still comes from normal SEO.
Do AI companies actually read it? Some tools do, adoption is growing, and it is uneven. We add it because it is nearly free and only helps. Treat it as one layer of AI SEO, not the whole strategy.
Can I just generate one automatically? You can, but the value is in the editing. A human-written page of true, specific statements beats an auto-generated dump of your sitemap.
Want to know how your business looks to AI assistants right now? Book a free call and we will check together, llms.txt included.