On this page
More of your visitors now arrive through an AI assistant than through a search box: someone asks a chat app which plumber covers their postcode, or lets an agentic browser compare three booking pages for them. Those assistants read your website the way a hurried person does — skimming, guessing which page matters, giving up early. llms.txt is the one-page brief you hand them at the door.
What llms.txt is
llms.txt is a plain Markdown file at the root of your site — https://your-site.com/llms.txt — proposed by Jeremy Howard in September 2024 and revised in August 2026 (llmstxt.org). In a few lines it says what your business is and which pages an assistant should read first. The format is deliberately simple: a title, a one-paragraph summary, a few plain facts, then short lists of links with a note on each.
It is a sibling of two files you probably already have:
| File | Who reads it | What it says |
|---|---|---|
robots.txt | Crawlers | Where you may and may not go |
sitemap.xml | Search engines | Every page that exists |
llms.txt | AI assistants and agents | What matters, and where to start |
The sitemap lists everything; llms.txt curates. The robots file forbids; llms.txt invites.
What it will and will not do
Be clear-eyed here, because much of the internet is not. Google said in June 2026 that an llms.txt file neither helps nor hurts your Search rankings — it is "fine to maintain for other services" (Search Engine Land). It is not an SEO trick, and anyone selling it as one is selling a myth.
What it does do is make your site legible to agents. The proposal's own reasoning: "Agents are best served by concise, expert-level information gathered in a single, accessible location." An assistant has a small window of attention per page; a 200-word brief pointing at the right five pages beats two hundred navigation links and a cookie banner.
Adoption is early — about 8.7% of the top 1,000 websites had one as of June 2026 (Rankability) — which is exactly why a small business that publishes one stands out. The tooling is catching up too: Chrome's Lighthouse gained an "Agentic Browsing" category in M150 that grades how well a page works for AI agents (Chrome developers blog).
Write yours in 10 minutes
Copy this, replace the bracketed parts, save it as llms.txt in the same place your robots.txt lives, and you are done.
# [Business name]
> [One sentence: what you do, for whom, where.] [One sentence: why you are the right choice.]
- Opening hours: [Mon–Fri 9–18, Sat 10–14]
- Service area: [city / delivery radius]
- Contact: [the phone or email customers may actually use]
## Start here
- [Services and prices](https://[your-site]/services): what we offer, with prices
- [Book an appointment](https://[your-site]/book): online booking, instant confirmation
- [FAQ](https://[your-site]/faq): shipping, returns, cancellations
## About
- [Our story](https://[your-site]/about): who we are
## Optional
- [Blog](https://[your-site]/blog): occasional newsThree rules keep it useful:
- Truth over polish. Assistants repeat what you write. When your hours change, change the file.
- Link to pages, not to your home page. The whole point is to skip the guessing.
- Put what customers ask about most first. Prices, hours, how to book.
If your pages also exist as Markdown — the same address with .md on the end — say so; assistants would rather read Markdown than parse HTML. If they do not, skip it.
Or let your assistant write it
You do not have to write it by hand. Paste this into any AI assistant that can read your site — including your mate, once it knows your website:
Read my website at https://[your-site] and write an llms.txt for it following llmstxt.org:
an H1 with the business name, a two-sentence blockquote summary, 3–5 plain facts
(hours, area, contact), then H2 sections linking my most useful pages, each with a
one-line note. Use only facts you actually find on the site. Mark anything you are
unsure about with [CHECK]. Keep it under 300 words.Read the draft once, fix the [CHECK] marks, and publish it.
How Busymate AI uses it
We publish our own at /llms.txt: the product summary, the facts an assistant can rely on, and every public page as a Markdown twin — append .md to any page address on this site and you get the clean text version. The full corpus is at /llms-full.txt. If you want to see what a finished file looks like, that one is a good shape to copy.
It also feeds the assistant we build for you: when your mate learns your website, a good llms.txt is the fastest way to tell it what matters. And pricing starts where a small site starts.
The next step: let agents act, not only read
llms.txt tells an assistant what your site says. WebMCP tells it what your site can do — book, check an order, start a return — with the visitor confirming each action. Chrome ships it as an origin trial and ChatGPT's desktop browser already uses it (Chrome docs, ChatGPT docs). You can inspect any site to see what it exposes, follow the adoption steps, or read the page tools guide for the one-line setup. Together, the two are what "agent-ready" means in 2026.
Questions
Does llms.txt improve my Google ranking?
No. Google said in June 2026 that an llms.txt file neither helps nor hurts Search rankings. Its value is making your site easy for AI assistants and agents to read, which is a different audience from the search index.
Where does the file go?
At the root of your domain, next to robots.txt — https://your-site.com/llms.txt. Any host or CMS that lets you upload a plain file can serve it; no code is involved.
Do I still need robots.txt and a sitemap?
Yes. robots.txt sets crawler permissions, sitemap.xml lists every page that exists, and llms.txt curates what matters and where to start. The three complement each other.
What is llms-full.txt?
An optional companion that holds the full text of your key pages in one file, so an assistant can read everything in a single request. Documentation-heavy sites benefit; a small business site rarely needs one.
How often should I update it?
Whenever a fact in it changes — prices, opening hours, services, contact details. Assistants repeat what the file says, so a stale file is worse than none.
Can your mate write it for me?
Yes. Once your mate knows your website, paste the prompt from this article into the chat, read the draft once, fix anything marked [CHECK], and publish it.