NightshiftDirect

Glossary

llms.txt

llms.txt is a plain text file, written in Markdown, that a site can publish at its root to give AI tools a short description of the site and links to its most useful pages. It is a proposal, not a standard that search engines or AI assistants have committed to.

By NightshiftDirect Research. Published . Updated .

Where the idea comes from

The file comes from a public proposal at llmstxt.org. It suggests a Markdown file at /llms.txt that gives an AI agent brief background on a site and points it to the pages that hold the detail, so the agent does not have to wade through menus, scripts and design to find them. The proposal says the file is used most heavily for software documentation, where coding tools follow its links to reach reference pages.

Nothing in the proposal binds any AI company. It is a format that some sites publish and some tools read, and a site that skips it loses nothing that any AI company has said it uses.

What it can do for a local business today

Very little that anyone can measure. The pages where OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity explain their crawlers describe rules in robots.txt, and none of them says the crawlers read llms.txt (OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity). Google says there are no additional requirements or special optimizations for appearing in its AI features, beyond a page being indexed and eligible to show with a snippet (Google Search Central).

So if someone offers to raise your visibility in AI answers by adding this file, ask which assistant reads it and where that company says so. If they cannot point to the page, you are paying for a guess.

What matters more for AI answers

Whether an assistant can find and cite your business depends on groundwork that sits elsewhere. Its search crawler has to be allowed in by your robots.txt, and your pages have to be in the search index. It also helps when your name, address, phone number and services are clear on the page, and your structured data says the same. The free scan checks those first: a blocked AI search crawler is A1, and a business the scan cannot identify is A3.

Once that groundwork is right, an llms.txt file is cheap to add. It takes a few minutes, it does no harm as long as it stays accurate, and if more tools start reading it you are covered already. That is why the scan reports a missing file as information, not as a problem.

What goes in a good one

For a local business it can be short: a line on who you are and where you work, then links to the pages that matter most, such as your services, the towns you cover, your prices if you publish them and how to reach you. Keep it true and keep it current. It should never say anything your website does not already say.

We publish one on this site, grouped by the kind of page, and it is rebuilt every time the site is. If your site builder can publish a plain text file at the root of your domain, you can do the same.

What the free scan checks

Questions

Will adding llms.txt get my business mentioned by ChatGPT?

Nobody can say that it will. OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity each publish how their crawlers work, and none of them says those crawlers read the file. Google says its AI features need no special optimization. Letting their search crawlers in and keeping your business details clear does more.

Does llms.txt replace robots.txt?

No. robots.txt tells crawlers what they may fetch, and OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity all say their search crawlers follow it. When a person's question sends an assistant to a page, OpenAI says robots.txt may not apply, and Perplexity says its fetcher for those visits generally ignores it. llms.txt only suggests what is worth reading. It cannot allow or block anything.

Is there any harm in adding one?

Not if it is accurate. Treat it like any other page on your site: when your hours, services or prices change, change the file too, or it will point AI tools at information that is out of date.

Where this fits in our work

We handle this as part of AI search (GEO): Site work that helps ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI features read your site, understand who you are and cite you.

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