While robots.txt and sitemap.xml are designed for search engines, LLMs.txt is optimized for reasoning engines. It provides information about a website to LLMs in a format they can easily understand.
While websites serve both human readers and LLMs, the latter benefit from more concise, expert-level information gathered in a single, accessible location. This is particularly important for use cases like development environments, where LLMs need quick access to programming documentation and APIs.
llms.txt markdown is human and LLM readable, but is also in a precise format allowing fixed processing methods (i.e. classical programming techniques such as parsers and regex).
llms.txt is designed to coexist with current web standards. While sitemaps list all pages for search engines, llms.txt offers a curated overview for LLMs. It can complement robots.txt by providing context for allowed content. The file can also reference structured data markup used on the site, helping LLMs understand how to interpret this information in context.
The approach of standardizing on a path for the file follows the approach of /robots.txt and /sitemap.xml. robots.txt and llms.txt have different purposes—robots.txt is generally used to let automated tools know what access to a site is considered acceptable, such as for search indexing bots. On the other hand, llms.txt information will often be used on demand when a user explicitly requests information about a topic, such as when including a coding library’s documentation in a project or when asking a chatbot with search functionality for information.
It serves a fundamentally different purpose than existing web standards like sitemap.xml and robots.txt./sitemap.xml lists all indexable pages, but doesn’t help with content processing. AI systems would still need to parse complex HTML and handle extra info, cluttering up the context window./robots.txt suggests search engine crawler access, but doesn’t assist with content understanding either./llms.txt solves AI-related challenges. It helps overcome context window limitations, removes non-essential markup and scripts, and presents content in a structure optimized for AI processing.
If your website runs on a well known CMS i.e. Wordpress, there are plugins that will create the llms.txt files the same way they create sitemap.xml. Use that plugin and see if the result is satisfactory.
You can access your llms.txt file in:
[yourwebsite]/llms.txt
To create effective llms.txt files, consider these guidelines: Use concise, clear language. When linking to resources, include brief, informative descriptions. Avoid ambiguous terms or unexplained jargon. Run a tool that expands your llms.txt file into an LLM context file and test a number of language models to see if they can answer questions about your content.
