llms.txt is a Markdown file at the root of your site that gives AI tools a short, clean map of it: who you are in one line, then your key pages with a note on each. Jeremy Howard proposed it in September 2024 and published a second version of the proposal in August 2026.
It is a small extra, not a ranking factor. Google says Google Search does not use llms.txt, and we found no OpenAI documentation saying ChatGPT does. We still add one for clients, because it takes minutes and it is written for the AI agents that read sites as they work.
What goes in the file
The proposal at llmstxt.org sets the order, and the generator above follows it exactly:
- An H1 with your site or business name. This is the only part the proposal requires.
- A blockquote with a short summary. The key facts a reader needs to understand everything below it.
- Optional free text. Paragraphs or lists of any kind, but no headings.
- Sections with H2 headings, each a list of links. Every item is a Markdown link,
[name](url), then optionally a colon and a note about the page.
A section called Optional is the convention for secondary links that an AI tool can skip when it needs a shorter version. In the first version of the proposal this section had a special technical meaning; version 2 keeps it as a convention only.
A small example for a clinic:
# Example Dental Clinic > Family dental clinic in Dubai Marina. Open 7 days. Checkups from AED 300. We treat children from age 3. Arabic, English and Hindi spoken. ## Key pages - [Prices](https://example.com/prices): every treatment with its price - [Book](https://example.com/book): online booking, same-week slots ## Optional - [Blog](https://example.com/blog): dental care guides
Does llms.txt help you get recommended by AI?
Be careful with anyone who sells llms.txt as the thing that gets you into ChatGPT. Here is what the companies say:
- Google says you "don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, markup, or Markdown to appear in Google Search (including its generative AI capabilities), as Google Search itself doesn't use them." It adds that keeping an llms.txt for other services is fine and "will neither harm nor help" your Google visibility.
- OpenAI documents its crawlers and robots.txt controls, but we found nothing saying ChatGPT reads llms.txt.
- The proposal itself is written for AI agents that read sites as they work. Its own examples are a coding agent fetching a library's documentation and a chat assistant with search reading pages to answer questions about a product.
So treat llms.txt like a good business card: cheap, useful when someone reads it, and no substitute for the work. What gets businesses named by AI is being readable by the AI search crawlers (our AI crawler checker tests that), having pages that answer buyer questions with real facts, and being mentioned on the outside sites AI trusts.
How to write one that is worth reading
- Write the summary like a fact sheet. What you do, for whom, where, and one number that matters (a starting price, years open, areas served). Skip slogans.
- Pick 10 to 20 pages, not all of them. The pages a buyer or an assistant needs: services, prices, locations, about, contact, booking, policies. Put blog posts and archives under Optional.
- Add a note to every link. "Prices: every treatment with its price" tells a reader far more than "Prices". The prefill button gives you addresses and rough names; the notes are your job.
- Use full addresses. https://example.com/prices, not /prices. The generator warns you when a link is not a full address.
- Keep it true and current. If a price or branch changes, change the file. A wrong llms.txt is worse than none.
Where to put it, and two optional extras
Upload the file so it opens at https://yourdomain.com/llms.txt. The proposal also allows a file in a subfolder, such as /docs/llms.txt, which covers only the pages under that folder. If your platform will not let you add a file at the root, ask your developer or host how to serve one there.
Version 2 of the proposal adds two optional ideas. Pages can offer a clean Markdown copy at the same address with .md added (page.html.md or page.md). And a page can point to its llms.txt with rel="describedby", as an HTML link tag or an HTTP Link header. adjoltz.com sends that header on every page.
You may also see llms-full.txt, a single file with the full text of a site. Some sites publish one, including ours, but it is not part of the proposal, so this generator does not make one.
What the generator does with your data
The form runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you type is sent to us unless you press Prefill, which reads your public homepage and sitemap to suggest a name, a summary and up to 30 addresses, shallowest first. That result is cached for 6 hours and then expires. There is no account and no tracking of what you build.