A real file, not a mockup
llms.txt lives at yoursite.com/llms.txt: a short text file with a title, a quick summary, and links to your key pages. Robots.txt controls access. llms.txt is different — it's a map, not a gate, meant to help AI find its way around a site instead of crawling the whole thing to figure out what you do. Roughly 9 in 10 sites still don't have one.
Most articles on this show you a made-up example. Here's a real one — this is aoaudit.com/llms.txt, exactly as it's live right now:
# The AO Audit — Answer Optimization AO = Answer Optimization — the practice the industry also calls AEO (answer engine optimization) and GEO (generative engine optimization). Pricing: free scan · $39 playbook · $497 The Answer (done-for-you) · $249/mo AO Care — https://aoaudit.com/pricing.html Versión en español: https://aoaudit.com/es.html > The AO Audit is a free interactive Answer Optimization (AO) audit that > scores how visible a business is to AI engines (ChatGPT, Gemini, > Perplexity, Google AI Mode) and AI agents. ## Core content - [The AO Audit](https://aoaudit.com/): run the audit and get your AO Score with a scored, prioritized fix list. - [Sample AO Report](https://aoaudit.com/sample-report.pdf): a real example of the full report, no email required. ## Key facts - Answer Optimization (AO) is the practice of making a business the answer AI engines give: findable, understandable, trustworthy, and transactable to machines. - Industry studies find sites with clean structured data are cited up to 3.2x more often in AI answers.
The file above isn't generated by a tool, and it isn't following some strict spec. It's plain text, shaped the way most working examples are shaped: a heading with the site's name, a quick pitch, a short summary, then a couple of link sections. Each link gets a one-line description.
Nobody enforces that shape, which is also why llms.txt files you find online rarely look identical to each other. There's no single correct format — just a common one people converged on.
Type yoursite.com/llms.txt into your browser. A 404 means you don't have one — that's the entire check. Or skip typing URLs and run a free AO Audit scan, which looks for llms.txt automatically alongside schema markup and AI-crawler access.
Open a plain text editor. Add a heading with your business name, a short paragraph on what you do and where, then link your most important pages — homepage, pricing, anything with real facts about the business. Save it as llms.txt, drop it in your site's root folder next to robots.txt, and you're done. No generator, no plugin. Fifteen minutes for most small businesses, not a project.
One caveat worth saying plainly: llms.txt is young. Nobody enforces the format, and there's no promise every AI system reads it yet. Still, it takes minutes to add and nothing to skip — except joining the 9 in 10 sites giving AI nothing to work with.
Check if your site has one — free AO Audit, 60 seconds →
A short text file at yoursite.com/llms.txt, written in plain Markdown, that summarizes a site for AI systems. Robots.txt decides who gets in. llms.txt is different — a map, not a gate, meant to help AI understand a site's structure and key pages without crawling everything first.
Short and plain: a heading naming the site, a one-paragraph summary, then a couple of sections linking to the most important pages, each with a one-line description. There's no fixed schema — a clear title, an honest summary, and organized links is the pattern nearly every real example follows, aoaudit.com's included.
Type yoursite.com/llms.txt into a browser. A 404 means no file exists. A free AO Audit scan checks for it too, automatically, alongside schema markup and AI-crawler access, so it's not a one-file-at-a-time job.
Open any text editor. Write a heading with your business name, a short summary of what you do, and link out to your key pages with one-line descriptions. Save it as llms.txt, upload it to your site's root folder. No generator tool needed — most small businesses can write one in about fifteen minutes.