Your customers increasingly ask ChatGPT and Claude before they ask Google. llms.txt is the file that decides whether those AIs can read — and recommend — your product.
llms.txt is a plain markdown file placed at your domain root that tells large language models which pages on your site to read, and what each one contains. Think of it as a signpost written for AI instead of search engines.
Where robots.txt tells crawlers what not to index, llms.txt does the opposite: it highlights what you want an AI to understand — your docs, your guides, your pricing — in a format models parse cleanly.
# example llms.txtThere’s also an optional companion, llms-full.txt, which contains the complete text of every page so a model can ingest your whole site in one request instead of crawling it page by page.
A common confusion is treating llms.txt as a replacement for sitemap.xml. They do different jobs:
Ship both. sitemap.xml wins you search ranking; llms.txt wins you AI discoverability — and in 2026, that second channel is growing fast.
A meaningful share of buying questions now start with “which tool should I use for…” typed into ChatGPT or Claude, not Google. When the model answers, it recommends products it can actually read about.
If your site has no llms.txt, the model either doesn’t mention you at all, or reconstructs you from stale training data. If you do have one, your docs become a first-class source — and your product becomes the named recommendation.
Here’s a minimal, standards-compliant starting point. Replace the sections and URLs with your own:
# My SaaSMaintain it as your docs grow — or let a tool like Answerly generate and keep it in sync automatically every time you publish.
llms.txt is a markdown file at your domain root that lists the pages you want large language models to read, with one-line descriptions. It helps ChatGPT and Claude understand and cite your site accurately.
No. sitemap.xml tells search-engine crawlers which URLs to index; llms.txt tells AI models which content to read semantically. Best practice is to ship both.
If you want AI assistants to recommend and cite your product, yes. A growing share of buying questions now go to ChatGPT and Claude first, and llms.txt is the easiest way to become readable to them.
Answerly generates — and keeps in sync — your llms.txt, llms-full.txt, and AI help center.
Generate my llms.txt →