Marketing loves a shiny new object. Right now it’s llms.txt. If you’ve been anywhere near SEO, AEO or AI search lately you’ve probably seen people saying every website needs one. Some are even calling it the key to getting found by ChatGPT and other AI tools. There’s a real idea behind llms.txt and it may become useful in some situations. But the claims being made about it are running a long way ahead of the evidence.

An llms.txt file is a proposed way to give certain AI tools a shorter, cleaner guide to the content on a website. It’s a plain text file written in Markdown and usually placed at yourwebsite.com/llms.txt. It can include a brief description of the website along with a hand-picked list of important pages, documents or other useful information.

The idea was proposed by Jeremy Howard and first published in September 2024. It came from a real problem. When an AI tool tries to gather information from a website, it may have to sort through menus, scripts, ads and other page elements that aren’t useful to the task. It may also have limits on how much information it can work with at one time.

The idea behind llms.txt is to give compatible tools a simpler place to start. This can be useful for websites with software documentation, technical guides, APIs or large libraries of information. A coding tool may use the file to find the right technical instructions without searching through an entire documentation website.

That doesn’t mean the file automatically makes a website easier to find or causes an AI tool to understand it better. It only provides a possible guide for tools that already support the format. The actual website content still needs to be clear, accurate and accessible.

It’s important to understand what llms.txt is not. It isn’t an official web standard, a ranking signal or a replacement for robots.txt or an XML sitemap. Robots.txt helps control which automated crawlers can access parts of a website. A sitemap helps search engines find pages. An llms.txt file is more like a suggested table of contents for an AI tool that has been built to look for it.

That last part matters. Adding the file doesn’t force Google, ChatGPT or any other tool to read it. It’s only useful when a tool chooses to find it, understands the format and does something with the information inside.

Businesses are worried about what AI search means for their websites. That makes sense. Search is changing, people are using tools like ChatGPT to find information and nobody wants to be left behind. Unfortunately that fear also makes it very easy to sell simple technical jobs as urgent marketing solutions.

An llms.txt file is perfect for that. It sounds technical, it’s easy to add to a website and it can be presented as something new that your competitors might already be doing. Before long a reasonable experiment turns into another “do this now or disappear” sales pitch.

And honestly that’s where a useful idea starts turning into bullshit.

Google’s own guidance says there are no extra technical requirements for appearing in AI Overviews or AI Mode. It specifically says website owners don’t need to create new machine-readable files or AI text files to appear in those results. The page still needs to be crawlable, indexed and eligible to appear in regular Google Search.

OpenAI’s guidance takes a similar practical approach. If you want content to be available in ChatGPT search it says to make sure its search crawler isn’t blocked by your robots.txt file. Its current publisher guidance focuses on making the actual website accessible. It doesn’t present llms.txt as a shortcut to being found, ranked or cited.

The early data doesn’t support the bigger marketing claims either. SE Ranking studied nearly 300,000 websites and found no connection between having an llms.txt file and being cited more often by AI tools. A separate Ahrefs study of more than 137,000 websites found that 97 percent of the llms.txt files in its study received no requests at all during May 2026. Even when a file is fetched that still doesn’t prove its contents affected an answer or citation.

None of this means llms.txt will never matter. The proposal is still changing and some AI agents and coding tools can already use it. If your business builds software, provides an API or has a large technical knowledge base it may be worth testing. But that’s very different from telling a plumbing company, retail store or other small business that it needs an llms.txt file to survive AI search.

For most businesses the better place to start is still the website itself. Make sure search engines can crawl and index your important pages. Give each major service a useful page of its own. Use clear page titles and headings, answer the questions customers actually ask and make the site easy to use on a phone. Those basic SEO choices still matter including for Google’s AI search features.

The message on the website matters just as much. People should be able to understand who you help, what you do, where you work and what they should do next. That takes thoughtful website design but it also takes clear writing and a strong brand that people can understand and remember. Case studies, reviews, useful examples and honest answers will do more for a business than another file filled with claims nobody can see.

And yes. This is still SEO. The way people search is changing but the basic job hasn’t suddenly become something new. Search engines and AI search tools still need pages they can access, understand and trust. Strong internal links help them find related pages. Clear service information gives them useful answers. Accurate contact details, a well-maintained Google Business Profile and a good local reputation help support everything else.

These things aren’t new or exciting. They also aren’t quick tricks. But they make a website better for real people, and that’s still the safest place to put your time and money.

There's probably no harm adding an accurate llms.txt file if you want to experiment.  If you have technical documentation or content that AI agents regularly need to navigate there may even be a real reason to use one.  Just don't mistake "easy to add" for "important to your marketing".

For most small businesses, llms.txt isn’t something to lose sleep over. Get the SEO basics right. Make your website useful. Say what you do clearly and give people a reason to trust you.

Honestly, I’d still spend twenty minutes making my website clearer before I’d spend twenty minutes adding an llms.txt file. If you’re not sure what your website should be focusing on start with a conversation about what will actually make a difference.