⭐ Beginner — No coding experience needed
llms.txt: What It Is and Why Your Website Needs One Now
Learn what llms.txt is, why it helps AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity understand your website, and how to create one in minutes. Step by step for complete beginners.
What you will learn in this guide
- What llms.txt is and where the standard comes from
- How llms.txt helps AI tools understand your website
- What to put in your llms.txt file
- How to check if your llms.txt is correctly formatted
- How to generate a llms.txt file for your site automatically
- How to verify AI tools can access your llms.txt
1 What is llms.txt?
llms.txt is a plain text file you place at the root of your website — just like robots.txt or sitemap.xml. It is designed to help AI language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity understand what your website is about and which pages are most important.
The standard: llms.txt was proposed by fast.ai in 2024 and has been adopted by thousands of websites. It is not an official W3C standard but is widely recognised by AI crawlers. See llmstxt.org for the full specification.
2 What goes in a llms.txt file
A basic llms.txt file contains your site name, a brief description, and links to your most important pages with descriptions of what each one covers.
✅ Example llms.txt
# AIWebPageSEO
> Free SEO tools for website owners — page speed, site audit, schema, content and local SEO.
## Core tools
- [Performance Tools](https://aiwebpageseo.com/performance-tools.html): Page speed, CLS, accessibility and HTTP error auditing
- [Audit Tools](https://aiwebpageseo.com/audit-tools.html): Site crawl, hreflang, redirects and meta analysis
- [Pricing](https://aiwebpageseo.com/pricing.html): Pay-as-you-go credits from 10p3 How to create and deploy your llms.txt
- 1Generate your llms.txt automaticallyGo to content-tools.html#llms and enter your site URL. The tool fetches your pages, scores your current llms.txt if one exists, and generates a corrected version.
- 2Upload the file to your server rootSave the generated content as llms.txt and upload it to the root of your site. It should be accessible at https://yoursite.com/llms.txt
- 3Verify it is accessibleVisit https://yoursite.com/llms.txt in your browser and confirm it returns plain text, not a 404 or HTML page.
- 4Update it when your site changesWhenever you add major new pages or change your site structure, re-run the LLMs.txt Auditor and update your file. Treat it like your sitemap — keep it current.