How llms.txt Helps You Stay Relevant in the Age of AI
For years, SEO was the name of the game. Rank high on Google, optimize your keywords, get clicks, and you win.
But let’s be honest: that game is changing. Fast.
Today, people are no longer just searching. They’re asking.
They go to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and other AI assistants to get instant, summarized answers, not a list of links. And that shift is killing traditional SEO as we know it.
But here's the catch, most businesses haven’t realized yet:
AI doesn’t read your website like Google does.
What Search Engines Do vs. What AI Tools Do
Search engines like Google crawl, index, and rank your entire website. That’s why SEO works - it’s based on an ecosystem designed for machines that read and process the whole web.
LLMs (Large Language Models) like ChatGPT? They don’t crawl your site. They don’t index anything long-term. They don’t even remember your pages unless someone directly links to them in a prompt.
AI tools work on demand. They answer in real time. That means they only scan limited content, often from outdated or unrelated sources - or from low-quality summaries pulled from random parts of the web.
So even if you have amazing content, product pages, tutorials, or FAQs - LLMs might skip right past it. Which leads to:
Outdated or incorrect answers about your brand
Missed opportunities in AI-powered discovery
Lost trust and visibility in the channels of the future
Enter llms.txt: Your AI Optimization Secret Weapon
Like robots.txt tells search engines what to index, llms.txt is a new file format designed specifically for large language models.
Think of it as a plain-text map that tells AI assistants:
What your site is really about
Which content is the most important
Where to find clean, clutter-free, Markdown versions of that content
In short, it helps AI answer questions about your business more accurately and completely.
It’s not about rankings anymore. It’s about representation.
A few sample llms.txt files, in action
Anthropic: https://docs.anthropic.com/llms-full.txt
Hugging Face: https://huggingface-projects-docs-llms-txt.hf.space/accelerate/llms.txt
Perplexity: https://docs.perplexity.ai/llms-full.txt
LLMsTxt Manager: https://llmstxtmanager.com/llms.txt
llms.txt Generator Tools
With the basic protocol outlined, various tools are available to help generate your file. Most will create smaller sites for free, and larger sites can be a custom job. Of course, many website owners will choose to develop their tool or scraper. Word of caution – research the security of any generator tool before using, and review your files before uploading. Here are a few of those free tools to check (but still subject to your validation):
Markdowner – A free, open-source tool that converts website content into well-structured Markdown files.
Appify – Jacob Kopecky’s llms.txt generator.
Website LLMs – This WordPress plugin creates your llms.txt file for you. Set the crawl to “Post”, “pages,” or both, and you’re in business. I was one of the first ten people to download this plugin; now it is at over 3,000 downloads in just three months.
FireCrawl – One of the first tools to emerge for creating llms.txt files.
Things to Consider When Creating a Llms.txt File
The points to be considered when creating the Llms.txt file are very important for the file to be processed correctly and effectively by artificial intelligence systems. In particular, writing the file in Markdown format and ensuring the content is clear, organized, and comprehensible allows large language models to understand this file easily. Let's look at the basic elements to consider when creating a llms.txt file.
Create a simple and straightforward file using the Markdown format.
Include only important content and avoid unnecessary details.
Avoid complex structures such as HTML or JavaScript.
Include up-to-date, accurate, and descriptive information.
Present optional and secondary content in a separate section.
Take care not to provide conflicting information with robots.txt.
Refresh your llms.txt file as your website is updated.
Why It Matters for Your Business
Whether you're selling products, offering services, publishing tutorials, or answering customer questions, there's a good chance your audience will encounter your brand through an AI summary before clicking your site.
If LLMs can’t find or understand your content, you're invisible. Or worse: you're misunderstood.
With llms.txt, you’re in control again. You show AI where to look, what to read, and how to talk about you.
What If You’re Not Using Yoast?
Yoast makes it simple by generating and refreshing the llms.txt file automatically, but what if your stack is different?
Good news: You can still do it manually or integrate it into your existing CMS. Here's how:
Create a plain text file named llms.txt in the root directory of your website.
In that file, list links to clean, plain-text Markdown (.md) versions of your most important pages.
Use Markdown format for those pages (you can convert them from HTML using tools like Pandoc, html2markdown, or AI-assisted converters).
Keep the Markdown files accessible via static URLs (e.g., https://yoursite.com/markdown/product-guide.md).
Update your llms.txt regularly, especially if content changes often.
Anthropic - the AI company behind Claude - has officially adopted the llms.txt standard. That sparked a wave of interest, creating a public directory tracking website that has implemented it. Over 680 sites have joined the movement, including documentation portals, SaaS platforms, and e-commerce stores. You can browse the growing list at llmstxt.cloud, which is regularly updated as more businesses recognize the importance of helping AI understand and represent their content accurately.
