What is llms.txt — and does your business need one?

llms.txt is a plain-text file that sits on your website and gives AI assistants — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and others — a clean, structured summary of who you are, what you do, and where your most important pages live. Think of it as a front-door briefing for AI: instead of an assistant piecing your business together from scattered pages, you hand it the facts directly.

Why it exists

A growing share of your potential customers no longer start at Google's blue links. They ask an AI assistant: "who's a good SEO consultant in Cardiff?", "recommend a family solicitor near Swansea". The assistant answers by drawing on websites it can read and trust. Websites are built for humans, though — full of navigation, pop-ups and marketing copy that make the underlying facts hard for a machine to extract reliably.

llms.txt, proposed in 2024 and adopted steadily since, solves this the same way robots.txt solved crawler instructions thirty years ago: a simple, predictable file at a standard address (yourdomain.co.uk/llms.txt) written in Markdown, that any AI system can find and parse in one pass.

What goes in one

A good llms.txt is short and factual: your business name, a one-paragraph description, your key services, coverage area, contact details, and an annotated list of your most important pages. Here's a trimmed version of the one on this site:

# Webolific

> Independent SEO consultancy based in South Wales, UK.
> Helps businesses in Cardiff, Newport and Swansea improve
> visibility in Google and AI-powered search.

## Key pages
- [SEO Cardiff](https://webolific.co.uk/cardiff-seo-services/):
  SEO services for Cardiff businesses, with pricing and FAQ

## Facts
- Independent consultant, not an agency
- No long-term contracts

That's genuinely it. No code, no plugins — a text file uploaded to your web root.

Does your business actually need one?

Honest answer: llms.txt is young, and adoption by the AI platforms is still uneven — it's a low-cost bet, not a guarantee. But the bet is asymmetric:

• Cost: thirty minutes, once, plus updates when your services change.
• Downside: none. It's invisible to human visitors and can't hurt your Google rankings.
• Upside: when an AI assistant summarises or recommends businesses like yours, your facts — services, coverage, contact details — are stated by you, not inferred from fragments.

For local service businesses, where AI recommendations increasingly answer "who should I use near me?" questions, we consider it standard kit — alongside the things that matter even more for AI visibility: structured data (schema markup), content that answers questions directly, and consistent business details across the web. llms.txt is one piece of AI search optimisation, not the whole job.

How to create yours

1. Write a one-paragraph factual description of your business — what you do, for whom, where.
2. List your 5–10 most important pages with a one-line description of each.
3. Add hard facts an AI should get right: services, coverage area, contact details, anything you're often asked.
4. Save it as llms.txt and upload it to your website's root directory.
5. While you're at it, check your robots.txt isn't blocking AI crawlers like GPTBot and ClaudeBot — many sites block them by accident and wonder why AI never mentions them.

The bigger picture

Whether llms.txt specifically becomes the standard matters less than what it represents: search is splitting into two audiences — human readers and machine readers — and your website now needs to serve both. The businesses that make themselves easy for machines to understand will be the ones AI recommends. The ones that don't will be invisible in a channel their customers are already using.