The idea was published in 2024 by Jeremy Howard and borrows its shape from robots.txt and sitemaps. You place a markdown style file at yoursite.com/llms.txt containing your site name, a short description and a curated list of important URLs with one line explanations. Some projects also publish llms-full.txt containing the actual content in plain text. Be clear about the status of this: it is a community proposal, not a standard, and the major AI companies have not confirmed that their crawlers use it. Treat it as optional housekeeping rather than a ranking lever.
That said, it costs almost nothing to add and it forces a useful exercise. Writing one line about each important page makes you decide which twenty pages actually matter on your site, and that clarity usually improves your navigation and internal linking too. For a contractor with service pages, city pages and a few guides, a short llms.txt is a half hour of work. Do it after the basics are handled. If your pages are slow, thin or missing a Google Business Profile, fix those first because those definitely affect visibility.
Send the site over. We will tell you what is broken, what you could rank for, and whether AI search knows you exist. No charge and no pitch deck.
