llms.txt for Business Websites: What It Is, What It Isn't
By Guillaume Rufenacht, RouterGrowth · published aug 2026
llms.txt is a plain-text file at your site root that tells AI systems what your business is, what you sell, and where the canonical pages live. It takes an afternoon, costs nothing, and ours is live for you to copy. It's also the most oversold file on the internet, so here are the honest limits too.
What llms.txt is
A convention proposed by Jeremy Howard in 2024 (llmstxt.org): a markdown file served at /llms.txt that gives language models a curated index of your site: what it is, the pages that matter, in prose a model parses cleanly. The comparison that explains it fastest: robots.txt tells crawlers what they may fetch; llms.txt tells language models what the site means.
What it can and can't do
Honest status: adoption is real but partial, and there's no public evidence that classic Google rankings read it at all. The consumers that exist today are AI agents and assistants acting on a user's behalf: an assistant asked "should I hire this agency?", an agent comparing vendors, an answer engine's retrieval step. For those readers, llms.txt is cheap insurance: when a machine summarizes your business, it works from your words instead of its guess. What it is not: a rankings switch, a substitute for citable pages, or a growth hack. It's plumbing, and plumbing is worth an afternoon.
What to put in one (service business edition)
Six things. A one-paragraph summary of what you do and for whom. Your services with real prices: an agent comparing providers fills a missing price with "unknown", and unknown loses. Who each service is for. Links to canonical pages (services, guides, about, contact). How to buy (the call, the email). Policies that matter (terms, privacy). Skip the adjectives; agents don't convert on "passionate" and "innovative", they extract facts.
A live example, annotated
Ours is at /llms.txt and it's the working template: a summary block stating the positioning and prices, a Services section with one line and a price per service, a Guides section pointing at the deep content, and a Company section with the method, the contact and the legal pages. Notice what's absent: no keyword stuffing, no marketing voice, nothing we wouldn't want quoted verbatim by an assistant, because verbatim quoting is the point.
Write yours in an afternoon
The checklist: plain markdown, summary paragraph on top, absolute URLs, real prices, current facts (stale llms.txt is worse than none: an agent will quote your old pricing with confidence), served at the site root as plain text. Then validate it the only way that matters: paste the URL into an assistant and ask it to describe your business and prices back to you. If the answer is wrong, the file is wrong.
Frequently asked questions
Does Google read llms.txt?
There's no public evidence it affects classic rankings. Write it for assistants and agents, and treat any search benefit as zero until demonstrated otherwise. The cost is an afternoon, so the bet doesn't need search to pay off.
Is there any risk in publishing one?
Only staleness: an agent confidently quoting last year's prices. Keep it current when your offer changes, and put nothing in it you wouldn't publish on a normal page; it's public by design.
llms.txt or schema markup?
Both; they serve different readers. Schema is structured metadata for crawlers and rich results; llms.txt is prose for language models. They should state the same true facts in two dialects, and disagreement between them is a bug.
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