llms.txt Explained: What It Is, Whether AI Answer Engines Read It, and How to Write One
Originally published on the Merlonix blog . /llms.txt is the file everyone adding "AI SEO" to their site keeps hearing about and nobody quite explains. It gets lumped in with robots.txt because it lives in the same place and has a similar name, so people assume it's another access-control file — a way to let the good AI crawlers in or keep them out. It is not. robots.txt says who may fetch what .…
LLMS.txt is a proposed convention for a single Markdown file that curates a site's most important content for large language models. It is not a standard or access control file, but rather a community convention mostly adopted by documentation sites and developer tools. The file lives at the domain root (https://example.com/llms.txt) and contains a short, hand-curated list of the site's key pages and links.
It is not enforced at the edge, but rather helps make the site legible to an agent that may otherwise have to reverse-engineer the site's navigation.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
