What is llms.txt and does my website need one?
AI & Answer Engines — answered straight, by an operator who builds these systems rather than an agency selling them.
llms.txt is a plain-text file at the root of your site that summarizes what your business does and links to your most important pages, written for AI systems rather than browsers. It is a proposed convention, not a standard — cheap to add, no downside, and it costs nothing to be early.
The longer version
Think of it as robots.txt's cooperative cousin. Where robots.txt says what a crawler may not touch, llms.txt says here is who we are and here is the short list of pages worth reading. For a service business that means the trade, the service areas, the phone number, and links to your service and city pages.
Be honest about the status: adoption is uneven and no major assistant guarantees it reads the file. It is not a substitute for schema markup, a clean site structure, or a complete Google Business Profile — those do the heavy lifting today. Add llms.txt because it takes ten minutes, not because it is a ranking factor.
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