You may have heard the advice “Add llms.txt to your site and AI will find you”. The idea is this: you put a plain text file summarising your content in your site's root directory, and language models read it.
Don't confuse it with robots.txt
robots.txt has been around for many years and is actually taken into account by search engines: it says which sections shouldn't be crawled.
llms.txt, on the other hand, is a community-driven proposal. Being a proposed file format doesn't mean the file gets read. For a standard to work, the side that reads it has to adopt it too.
Is adding it harmful?
No. A text file of a few kilobytes doesn't put any load on the site or break anything. If you want to add it, go ahead.
The problem is that it's mistaken for a visibility solution. If your pages don't answer questions, a summary file sitting in the root won't make up for it.
What should your priority be?
These four work in both classic search and generative search, and their effect can be measured today. At best, llms.txt is a small step to add on top of them.
- Service and pricing information written clearly on the page
- Frequently asked questions answered, written as real questions
- Business details marked up with structured data
- The site loading fast and being crawled properly
The short answer
It does no harm, but don't expect it to change anything on its own in rankings or AI visibility. Before adding a new file, make sure your existing pages answer questions.
