Straight answer
What is llms.txt, and do I need it?
llms.txt is a short plain-text fact sheet at yoursite.com/llms.txt that tells AI assistants who you are, what you sell, and where your important pages are. It’s a newer, voluntary convention that not every assistant uses yet, so it’s worth having because it costs almost nothing, but it won’t fix an unreadable website or a wrong Google listing on its own.
Updated October 4, 2026 · Free check at the bottom
What goes in it
Plain sentences and links. Your business name, one line on what you do and who for, where you are, your hours, what you sell or the services you offer, prices if you publish them, and links to the pages that matter. No code, no design.
Is anybody actually reading it?
On our own site: yes. AI assistants were asking for our llms.txt since August, before we had one. When we put it up, it was read 14 times in its first 12 hours. That’s our site, not a promise about yours, but it tells you the requests are real.
What it doesn’t do
- It doesn’t replace your Google and Bing listings; those are still what local answers start from.
- It doesn’t help if your site blocks AI crawlers. Check that first.
- It must match your website. If the fact sheet says you close at 6 and your site says 5, you’ve made the problem worse.
A good llms.txt for a small business has
-
Business name and one plain line on what you do
The sentence an assistant will most likely repeat.
-
Town, service area, address
Local answers are about place.
-
Hours, including what’s different on weekends and holidays
The fact assistants most often get wrong.
-
What you sell or do, in your customers’ words
Matches the questions people ask.
-
Links to your key pages: menu, services, prices, booking
Tells the assistant where the details live.
-
A date it was last updated
So stale facts are easy to spot.
Check it yourself in five minutes
- 1
Open ChatGPT in a private (incognito) window, so it isn't shaped by your own history, and ask: “best [what you do] near [your town]”
- 2
Ask the same question two more times, worded a little differently. Answers change from one ask to the next, so one try is not a verdict.
- 3
Write down who gets named, in what order, and what it says about each. Then ask it directly about your business by name and check every fact: hours, address, what you sell.
- 4
Do the same in Perplexity and Claude if you can. The businesses that show up everywhere are the ones whose facts are clear in the places all of them read.
Questions
Where does llms.txt go?
At the top level of your website, so it opens at yoursite.com/llms.txt, the same place robots.txt lives. On most site builders that means asking whoever manages your site, or using a custom-file feature.
Will llms.txt get me into ChatGPT?
Not on its own. It makes your facts easier to read for the assistants that use it. Your listings and the words on your website still do most of the work.
Do I need a developer?
No. It’s a plain text file you can write in Notepad. The only technical part is putting it at the right address on your site.
Free check · no sign-in
See what an AI assistant can read on your website.
Type your business’s website. We read your homepage the way a search crawler does and list what’s missing: business details assistants look for, page titles and descriptions, and anything hidden from search. Results show right on the page. No card, no account.
Want to know what an AI assistant actually says when your customers ask? That’s the weekly part of AI Visibility. Questions first? Email [email protected].