The llms.txt Guide: Help AI Engines Find Your Content
llms.txt is a plain-text file served at your domain root that gives AI engines a curated, readable map of your most important content. It does for answer engines what sitemap.xml does for crawlers — but in Markdown meant to be read, not parsed.
The format
The convention is simple: an H1 with your site name, a one-paragraph summary in a blockquote, optional key facts, then sections of links with one-line descriptions. Everything is standard Markdown.
- Start with `# Your Site Name`.
- Add a `>` blockquote stating what the site is in one or two sentences — this is the paragraph engines quote.
- List your best pages as `[title](url): description` bullets, best first.
- Serve it as text/plain at /llms.txt and keep it under a few kilobytes.
What to include (and what to skip)
Include the pages you would want quoted: definitive guides, product pages, methodology docs and pricing. Skip legal boilerplate, tag archives and anything you would not stand behind as an answer.
Keep descriptions factual and specific. “Complete guide to X with steps and a comparison table” beats “Read our blog”. Engines use these lines to decide whether the page is worth fetching.
Does it actually work?
Adoption is early but growing, and the cost is ten minutes. Several AI crawlers already fetch llms.txt when present, and the file doubles as a clean summary for any agent visiting your site. Maveriko scores its presence as part of AI retrievability — the same check this site passes with its own llms.txt.