GEO and AI answers

What is llms.txt?

Updated on November 6, 2026

llms.txt is a proposed text file placed at the root of a site to give AI assistants a short, curated guide to its content. It is a convention, not a standard that engines have committed to reading.

The format was proposed in September 2024: a Markdown file at /llms.txt with a summary of the site and links to its main pages, and an optional /llms-full.txt with the full text of those pages. The idea is to spare an assistant the work of crawling a whole site to understand it.

No major assistant has announced that it reads the file, and Google has said its search systems do not use it. It costs little to publish and does no harm, as long as the real pages stay readable by crawlers. SeoGeoMap serves both files; the pages themselves, with clear text and structured data, remain what gets cited.

Frequently asked questions

Is llms.txt a replacement for robots.txt?

No. robots.txt tells crawlers what they may fetch and is honoured by the main engines. llms.txt is a reading guide with no enforcement; a crawler can ignore it and read the site as usual.

Should a company publish an llms.txt?

It is cheap and harmless, so there is no reason not to. Expect no measurable effect from the file alone; the pages it points at do the work.

Related terms

robots.txt

robots.txt is the text file at the root of a site that tells crawlers which parts they may fetch, robot by robot. Honest crawlers obey it; it is not a security measure.

AI crawlers (GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot)

AI crawlers are the robots the assistant companies use to read websites, either to train models or to fetch sources for answers. Each has a name a site can allow or block in robots.txt.

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