Does llms.txt Do Anything for SEO? An Honest Guide

Published 22 July 2025 · Updated 2 October 2026 · By Tom Galland

Does llms.txt actually do anything for SEO or AI visibility? Not much. Google has said it does not use llms.txt for Search or AI Overviews, and there is no evidence that ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity use it to decide which businesses to recommend. Where it does help is with AI coding assistants and agents that read a site's documentation. It takes under an hour to create and does no harm, so add one if you like, but don't expect more traffic or rankings from it.

Below is what llms.txt is, what it can and can't do, how to structure one and the best practices worth following.

What is llms.txt?

llms.txt is a plain Markdown file that sits at the root of your website, at yoursite.com/llms.txt. It gives large language models a short summary of what the site is and a curated list of links to its most useful pages, so an AI tool can find the important content without reading menus, scripts and ads.

It was proposed by Jeremy Howard of Answer.AI in September 2024. It is a community proposal, not an official standard, and no search engine or AI company has committed to reading it.

Will an llms.txt file help your SEO?

No. There are three reasons:

• Google doesn't use it. Google's search team has said publicly that it does not support llms.txt, and Google's John Mueller compared it to the old keywords meta tag, which search engines stopped trusting years ago.
• AI answers come from search indexes. When ChatGPT or Perplexity answers a question with live results, it searches the web and cites pages it finds there. A file listing your pages doesn't change which pages rank in those searches.
• It can say anything. Because a site owner controls the file completely, it is easy to game. That is exactly why search engines don't give self-described signals like this much weight.

If you want your business to show up in AI answers, the things that work are the same things that work for Google: clear pages about what you do, consistent business details, reviews, and being mentioned on other trusted websites. See how to get your business mentioned in ChatGPT for the full approach.

Where llms.txt is actually useful

• Documentation and developer tools. AI coding assistants and agents fetch docs while they work. A clean llms.txt (and an llms-full.txt with the full text) helps them find the right page quickly.
• When someone points an AI tool at your site. If a user pastes your URL into an AI assistant and asks it to summarise your services, a well-organised llms.txt gives it a clean starting point.
• Forcing you to decide what matters. Writing a one-paragraph summary and a short list of your most important pages is a useful exercise in its own right.

How to structure llms.txt

The proposal sets out a simple Markdown structure, in this order:

1. An H1 with the name of the site or business. This is the only required part.
2. A blockquote with a one or two sentence summary.
3. Optional paragraphs or lists with any other context an AI tool needs.
4. H2 sections, each containing a list of links in the format [Page name](URL): short description.
5. An optional section headed ## Optional for links that can be skipped when space is limited.

Here is a simple example for a local service business:

# Example Plumbing

> Example Plumbing is a licensed plumbing business in Bondi Junction,
> Sydney, servicing the Eastern Suburbs since 2012.

## Services

- [Emergency plumbing](https://www.example.com.au/emergency-plumbing): 24/7 callouts across the Eastern Suburbs
- [Hot water systems](https://www.example.com.au/hot-water): Repairs and installation of gas, electric and heat pump systems
- [Blocked drains](https://www.example.com.au/blocked-drains): CCTV inspection and jetting

## About

- [About us](https://www.example.com.au/about): Licences, team and service area
- [Contact](https://www.example.com.au/contact): Phone, address and opening hours

## Optional

- [Blog](https://www.example.com.au/blog): Maintenance tips and guides

You can see a live example on our own site at seogrowth.com.au/llms.txt.

llms.txt best practices

• Keep it short. List the pages that matter most, not every URL. Your sitemap already does that job.
• Use full URLs. Absolute links are easier for tools to follow than relative ones.
• Write plain, factual descriptions. One line per link saying what the page covers. No marketing language and no keyword stuffing.
• Match your site and business details. The name, location and services should be identical to your website and Google Business Profile.
• Serve it as plain text. Put it at the root of your domain, make sure it returns a 200 status and isn't blocked in robots.txt.
• Update it when your site changes. Dead links and old services make the file worse than not having one.
• Don't use it to control access. To allow or block AI crawlers such as GPTBot or ClaudeBot, use robots.txt.

Websites using llms.txt

Adoption is strongest among developer-focused companies, where AI coding tools read documentation all day. Anthropic, Stripe, Cloudflare and Vercel all publish llms.txt files for their documentation, and documentation platforms such as Mintlify generate them automatically. Community directories list thousands more.

Adoption among small business websites is low, and that reflects the real value. If your customers are developers, add one. If your customers are searching Google for a local service, it is a nice to have at best.

llms.txt vs robots.txt

They do different jobs. robots.txt controls which URLs crawlers are allowed to access, and well-behaved crawlers follow it. llms.txt controls nothing. It is a suggested reading list. You need a correct robots.txt for every site. llms.txt is optional.

llms.txt FAQs