llms.txt: what it is, the format, and a template
llms.txt is a short Markdown file at your site root that tells AI tools what your site is and which pages matter. Here is the format, a template you can copy, and an honest note on who reads it.
A proposal from Jeremy Howard (Answer.AI, September 2024): put a Markdown file at /llms.txt with a one-paragraph summary of the site and a curated list of links, so a language model can understand the site without parsing navigation, scripts and ads.
- An H1 with the site or project name (the only required part).
- A blockquote (
>) with a short summary. - Optional paragraphs with details.
- H2 sections, each a list of
- [Title](URL): notelinks. - An H2 named
Optionalfor links an AI can skip when it needs a shorter context.
# Your Product > One or two sentences: what it is, who it's for, what it costs. ## Product - [Home](https://yourdomain.com/): what the product does - [Pricing](https://yourdomain.com/pricing): plans and prices - [Docs](https://yourdomain.com/docs/): how to get started ## Optional - [Blog](https://yourdomain.com/blog/): updates and guides
Real example: startwith1k.com/llms.txt (ours). Serve it as plain text at the site root, keep it under a few hundred lines, and update it when your key pages change.
Honest answer: unclear. Some developer-tool and documentation sites publish one, and some AI coding tools can fetch them, but the big AI search engines have not publicly committed to using llms.txt for ranking or answers. It takes ten minutes, so it's a cheap bet, but robots.txt rules and real text in your raw HTML matter more.
Our free checker reads your page the way AI crawlers do, checks robots.txt, raw-HTML text, JSON-LD and whether /llms.txt exists, and writes an llms.txt draft from your title, description and links.
Check my page and draft llms.txt →