What is llms.txt, and why your site needs one
llms.txt is the AI-era robots.txt: a plain-text map that tells models what your site is and where the good content lives. Here's what it is and how to add one.
AI assistants increasingly answer questions by reading your site directly. But your pages are built for browsers — nav bars, scripts, cookie banners — not for a model trying to find the substance. llms.txt fixes that: a single plain-text file at your site root that says, in clear language, what your site is and where the important content lives.
How it works
You place a file at /llms.txt. It starts with an H1 (your site name), a short summary, then curated links to the pages that actually matter — docs, key articles, product pages. Some sites also ship llms-full.txt with the full text inlined, so a model never has to crawl at all.
# Acme Docs
> The developer platform for X.
## Guides
- Quickstart: https://acme.dev/docs/quickstart
- API reference: https://acme.dev/docs/apiWhy it matters for ranking
- Models cite sources they can parse cleanly — llms.txt makes your best pages legible.
- It complements robots.txt and sitemap.xml rather than replacing them.
- It is cheap insurance: a few lines that shape how AI describes you.
The catch is keeping it correct as your site changes. That is exactly the chore the AI Crawlability skill automates — it reads your real routes and writes llms.txt, llms-full.txt and a wired sitemap straight into your repo.