llms.txt: What It Is, a Real Example, and an Honest Verdict
What llms.txt is, the exact file I publish on josuebarros.com, how to validate it, and why I treat it as a cheap bet instead of a ranking factor.
What is llms.txt?
It is a plain-text (Markdown) file at /llms.txt that summarizes your site for AI agents: who you are, what the site contains, and links to the pages worth reading, each with a one-line description. The idea is that an agent should not have to crawl and guess.
What does mine look like?
Mine starts with a single-paragraph description, then sections: hiring, selected results, companies, skills, projects, blog, and benchmarks. Every blog post and every benchmark page is listed with its description, generated from the same content files as the sitemap, so the lists cannot drift. You can read it at /llms.txt.
The structure, in short:
# Your Name
> One paragraph: who you are and what you do.
## Section
- [Page title](https://example.com/page): one-line description
Does it work?
I do not know, and I am wary of anyone who says they do. As of this writing I know of no public evidence that search engines use it for ranking or that it increases how often assistants cite a site. Some discussions of it are openly skeptical. I publish one because it costs minutes, it forces me to write a clear summary of the site, and some agents may use it.
How should I validate it?
curl -I https://yoursite.com/llms.txtand check for status 200 andcontent-type: text/plain.- Check that every link in the file returns 200.
- Make sure the facts match your About page exactly. Conflicting facts are worse than no file.
- Generate the file from your content source so it updates when you publish.
What matters more than llms.txt?
Pages worth citing. Assistants and search engines need a reason to use your page: original data, a direct answer in the first paragraph, accurate structured data, and crawlers that are allowed in. I explain how I applied that to my own site in the AEO, GEO and SEO checklist, and the measured pages are in the benchmarks index.
FAQ
- What is llms.txt?
- A proposed convention: a Markdown-formatted text file served at /llms.txt that summarizes a site and links to its most useful pages, written for language-model agents rather than for people.
- Does llms.txt help you rank or get cited?
- I am not aware of public evidence that it does. Some AI tools may read it; major search engines have not said they use it for ranking. Publishing one is cheap, so it is a reasonable bet, not a proven tactic.
- How do I create an llms.txt file?
- Write a title, a one-paragraph summary, and sections of links with one-line descriptions, then serve it as text/plain at /llms.txt. Generate it from the same data as your sitemap so it never drifts.
- How do I check that it works?
- Fetch it with curl, confirm the content type is text/plain, confirm every link returns 200, and keep the facts identical to your About page.
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