What Is llms.txt and How Do You Create One? A Guide with Examples

You know robots.txt: it sits at the root of your site and tells search engine bots where they may go. llms.txt sits in the same place but does the opposite job. It doesn't block, it introduces. It gives a language model a short summary: "this is what the site is about, here's where to look first."

What it does

When a language model reads a site, it has to dig the real information out from menus, cookie banners, promo strips and hundreds of pages. llms.txt skips that noise and gives the essence: the business name, a one-sentence description, links to the most important pages and what each one covers.

The file is in Markdown, so a heading and a few bullet points. Nothing complicated; the real difficulty is writing it short and accurate.

What it doesn't do

Let's be honest: llms.txt is not a ranking signal. Nobody starts recommending you because you wrote one. Not every model reads the file yet, and how the ones that do weigh it is not clear.

We still recommend creating one, for two reasons. First, it costs close to nothing and, done right, cannot hurt. Second, writing it forces you to answer "how do we describe our business in one paragraph", and that answer is useful across the rest of your site.

Format

The file should live at https://yoursite.com/llms.txt as plain text. The skeleton looks like this:

# Business Name

> One-sentence description: what you do, for whom, where.

A few lines of explanation. What sets you apart, how many years you've been doing this, which areas you serve.

## Services

- [Service A](https://yoursite.com/service-a): What it is, in one sentence
- [Service B](https://yoursite.com/service-b): What it is, in one sentence

## Frequently asked questions

- [FAQ](https://yoursite.com/faq): Questions about pricing, timing, warranty

## Contact

- [Contact](https://yoursite.com/contact): Address, phone, opening hours

Order matters: name and description at the top, then services, then supporting pages. Even if the model doesn't read the whole file, it should recognise you from the first few lines.

Common mistakes

• Copying the sitemap. llms.txt is not a list of every page, it's a list of the important ones. A file with fifty links is as useless as a file with none.
• Advertising language. Phrases like "industry leader, highest quality, best price" tell the model nothing. "In İzmir since 2009, 400 projects a year" does.
• Not updating links. If a page moves and the address in llms.txt returns a 404, the file's credibility drops.
• Serving it as HTML. The file must be plain text; some servers wrap .txt files in an HTML template. Open it in a browser and view the source.
• Relying on llms.txt alone. The file is a summary. If the pages it points to are empty, outdated or closed to crawlers, the summary is useless too.

Checking it

Once the file is in place, check three things: does the address return 200, is the content type text/plain or text/markdown, and do all the links open.

If you'd rather not write it from scratch, the llms.txt generator at protan.ai asks you to fill in a form and produces the file; everything happens in your browser, nothing is sent to a server. The free scan then checks whether the file actually exists on your site and is served correctly.