A proposed standard: a markdown file at /llms.txt that tells AI systems what your site is and where the important content lives - like robots.txt, but for meaning rather than permission.

Where does llms.txt go?

At the root of your domain, reachable at https://yourdomain.com/llms.txt, served as plain text or markdown.

Does my site need an llms.txt?

It is a proposal, not a ratified standard, and support is uneven - so nobody can promise you a result. It costs one small file, it says nothing an assistant could not otherwise guess wrong, and it is the cheapest of the AI-readiness signals to fix.

How do I check whether my site has one?

Open https://yourdomain.com/llms.txt in a browser: a 404 means you do not have one. An AwesomeTechStack audit checks it too and grades it as part of AI-Readiness.

AI-Readiness

What is llms.txt?

A proposed standard for telling AI assistants what your site is about - one markdown file at the root of your domain.

What it is

A markdown file at /llms.txt that says, in plain words, what your site is and where its important content lives. The comparison people reach for is robots.txt, and it is a good one as long as you keep the difference in view: robots.txt says who may read you. llms.txt says what is worth reading.

It exists because an assistant answering a question about your product does not browse the way a person does. It has one shot at working out what you are, and a navigation menu, a cookie banner and forty links are a poor way to explain that. The file is the short version, written by you instead of guessed by a machine.

What goes in it

A heading with the name, one blockquote that summarises the site in a sentence, then linked sections - each link with a few words saying what is behind it. That is the whole format. Here is the top of ours, live at awesometechstack.com/llms.txt:

# AwesomeTechStack

> AwesomeTechStack audits any website's technology stack and scores it
> from 0 to 100 - the Awesomeness Score.

## Core pages
- [Methodology](https://awesometechstack.com/methodology): How the score is computed.
- [Pricing](https://awesometechstack.com/pricing): The plans and what each includes.

Keep it short and keep it true. A file that lists every page is a sitemap with extra steps, and a file that oversells is worse than none - it is the one description of you a machine will take at face value.

Do you need one?

Honest answer first: llms.txt is a proposal, not a ratified standard, and support for it is uneven. Anyone who promises you a ranking effect is guessing. We grade it because it is a signal of intent and because it costs almost nothing - not because we can prove what any particular assistant does with it.

Worth doingProducts, documentation and anything with a story that is spread across many pages - exactly the case where a machine's summary of you is most likely to be wrong.
Barely mattersA one-page site whose purpose is obvious from its first paragraph. The file would repeat what is already there.
The real costTen minutes, once - and the discipline to update it when the site changes. A stale llms.txt describes a product you no longer sell.

Does your site have one?

Open https://yourdomain.com/llms.txt in a browser. If you get a 404, you do not have one - there is no subtler test, and no tool needed.

An audit checks it for you along with the other AI-readiness signals: whether AI crawlers are allowed, whether the content is readable before scripts run, whether there is structured data to quote, and whether a sitemap exists. Those six are graded A-F together, and the grade counts as the fourth dimension of the Awesomeness Score.

How AI-Readiness is graded

Questions

What is llms.txt?: A proposed standard: a markdown file at /llms.txt that tells AI systems what your site is and where the important content lives - like robots.txt, but for meaning rather than permission.
Where does llms.txt go?: At the root of your domain, reachable at https://yourdomain.com/llms.txt, served as plain text or markdown.
Does my site need an llms.txt?: It is a proposal, not a ratified standard, and support is uneven - so nobody can promise you a result. It costs one small file, it says nothing an assistant could not otherwise guess wrong, and it is the cheapest of the AI-readiness signals to fix.
How do I check whether my site has one?: Open https://yourdomain.com/llms.txt in a browser: a 404 means you do not have one. An AwesomeTechStack audit checks it too and grades it as part of AI-Readiness.