SEO and AEO
What is llms.txt? A practical guide for business websites
By Javier Fernández. Published
llms.txt is a plain-text Markdown file at the root of a website (yoursite.com/llms.txt) that gives AI models a short, curated map of your most important pages. It was proposed in 2024 at llmstxt.org. Google does not use it for search, and no major AI platform has confirmed using it for answers, so treat it as a cheap, low-risk extra, not a ranking factor.
What llms.txt contains
The proposed format is simple Markdown: an H1 with your company name, a one-paragraph summary in a blockquote, then sections with lists of links, each with a short note. The goal is to give an AI system, at inference time, a clean summary of who you are and where the key information lives, without parsing navigation, scripts and ads.
Our own llms.txt (sylvaracreative.com/llms.txt) is generated from the same data that builds the site, so it never drifts from the pages: company summary, services in both languages, markets, case studies and blog posts.
Does llms.txt help with ChatGPT or Google?
Google has said it does not use llms.txt, and its AI Overviews and AI Mode rely on regular Googlebot crawling. No major AI assistant has publicly confirmed using llms.txt to choose sources. What clearly matters for AI citations is crawler access in robots.txt (OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot), answer-first content, structured data and brand mentions.
So why publish one? It takes an hour, carries no risk and helps tools and agents that do read it, such as coding assistants and some AI browsers. Keep it short and generated from your source of truth.
llms.txt vs robots.txt vs sitemap.xml
robots.txt tells crawlers what they may access. sitemap.xml lists every URL for search engines to discover. llms.txt is a short, human-readable summary for language models. They complement each other; llms.txt replaces neither.