Glossary
llms.txt
In short: llms.txt is a proposed plain-text file at a site's root that gives AI systems a short, curated description of the site and links to its most important pages.
llms.txt is a Markdown file served at https://www.example.co.uk/llms.txt, following a proposal published in September 2024. It contains an H1 with the site name, a blockquote summary, optional context paragraphs and H2 sections listing key pages as [title](url): description. A companion llms-full.txt can hold the full text of those pages in one file.
The idea is to give a language model, whose context window is small compared with a website and whose fetched HTML is mostly navigation and scripts, a clean summary of who you are and where the authoritative pages live.
Be realistic about its effect. No major AI provider has committed to reading it the way search engines read robots.txt or sitemaps, and evidence that it changes answers directly is thin. It is worth having because it is cheap, harmless, used by some agents and retrieval tools, and because writing a clear 300-word description of your business is exactly the entity-clarity exercise that GEO rewards. Reuse that text in your About page and Organization schema.
Seoptist checks for the file's presence, reachability and quality in its audit, and generates one from your business profile on the Growth plan and above.