Listen: llms.txt
A proposed root file offering a markdown map of a site's key pages for language models; put forward in 2024 but not adopted by Google or other major AI platforms.
Transcript
There is a new proposal for website owners called L-L-M-S dot text. The idea is simple: place a clean, plain-text file at your site's root directory to give artificial intelligence models a tidy map of your key pages. This saves the AI from having to parse through messy code, acting much like a modern version of robots dot text.
But so far, the major AI platforms are not buying in. Google has publicly dismissed the idea, comparing it to the long-dead keywords tag, and no major crawler currently honors it.
Still, some publishers are setting up these files anyway. They are cheap to generate from existing data and cost nothing to maintain. For now, it is best to treat the file as a low-effort bet on the future, rather than a working channel for AI visibility today.