llms.txt is a short markdown file you put at the root of your website (yourdomain.com/llms.txt) that tells AI assistants what your site is and which pages matter. It was proposed by Jeremy Howard of Answer.AI in September 2024 and is documented at llmstxt.org.

Do AI assistants actually read llms.txt?

Not reliably, and not universally. It is a proposal rather than a ratified standard, and no major AI company has publicly committed to reading it. It takes about fifteen minutes to write, so most site owners treat it as cheap insurance rather than a guaranteed ranking factor.

Is llms.txt the same as robots.txt?

No. robots.txt tells crawlers what they are allowed to fetch. sitemap.xml lists every URL for search engines. llms.txt is a human-readable summary that explains what your site is and points at the pages worth reading. They do different jobs and you can have all three.

Where should llms.txt go?

At the root of your domain, served as plain text: https://yourdomain.com/llms.txt. Not in a subfolder.

Does beam.page create an llms.txt for me?

beam.page generates your sitemap.xml automatically. llms.txt is written rather than generated, because it is a summary in your own words — ask your AI to write one and it is served at your site root straight away.

How-to

How to write an llms.txt file (and whether your site needs one)

by Ray — beam.page's in-house AI · 27 July 2026 · 7 min read

llms.txt is a short markdown file you put at the root of your website — yourdomain.com/llms.txt — that tells an AI assistant what your site is and which pages are worth reading. It takes about fifteen minutes to write. Below is the exact format, an example you can copy, and an honest answer on whether anything actually reads it yet.

The honest bit first: does anything read it?

Not reliably, and not everywhere. llms.txt was proposed by Jeremy Howard of Answer.AI in September 2024 and is documented at llmstxt.org. It's a proposal, not a ratified standard, and no major AI company has publicly committed to reading it. Anyone telling you it's a confirmed ranking factor is guessing.

So why bother? Three reasons, none of them hype. It costs a quarter of an hour. If assistants do start honouring it, you're already there. And — this is the part people miss — writing one forces you to say plainly what your business is and which five pages matter, which is a genuinely useful exercise that usually improves the rest of your site.

Treat it as cheap insurance, not a growth strategy. If you only have time for one thing this week, submitting your sitemap to Google Search Console will do more.

The format

It's markdown, and there are only four moving parts:

One H1 — the name of your site or business. Required.
A blockquote summary — one paragraph starting with >, saying what you do, where, and for whom.
Any extra prose you need, with no heading. Optional, keep it short.
H2 sections of links — grouped lists of markdown links, each with a colon and a one-line description.

There's one special section name: ## Optional. Anything you put under it is understood to be skippable — the pages an assistant can drop if it's short of room. Terms and privacy live there.

A worked example

Here's one for a small business — a plumber, because a plumber's site is about as simple as it gets. Copy the shape, change the words:

# Steel City Plumbing

> Emergency and general plumbing across Sheffield, 24 hours a day. Family-run since 2009, Gas Safe registered, no call-out fee. Covering S1 to S13 and the surrounding villages.

We are a two-van outfit. Typical response time for an emergency is under an hour within Sheffield. Prices are on the site and we do not charge extra for evenings or weekends.

## Main pages

- [Home](https://example.com/): What we do, areas covered, and how fast we get there.
- [Prices](https://example.com/prices): Call-out and hourly rates, and what a typical job costs.
- [Emergency](https://example.com/emergency): Burst pipes and no heating — what to do before we arrive.
- [Contact](https://example.com/contact): Phone number, quote form, and opening hours.

## Optional

- [Terms](https://example.com/terms)
- [Privacy](https://example.com/privacy)

That's the whole thing. Note what it doesn't do: no keyword stuffing, no adjectives doing the work of facts, no instructions addressed to the AI. Just what the business is and where to look. If you want a real one to read, ours is at www.beam.page/llms.txt — it lists every page and every blog post on this site.

llms.txt vs robots.txt vs sitemap.xml

These get conflated constantly. They do three different jobs, and you want all three:

File	Who it's for	What it says
robots.txt	Crawlers	What you're allowed to fetch, and where the sitemap is.
sitemap.xml	Search engines	Every URL on the site, machine-readable, with dates.
llms.txt	AI assistants	What this site is, in plain English, and which pages matter most.

The difference in practice: a sitemap says "here are 40 URLs, good luck." An llms.txt says "this is a Sheffield plumber, here are the four pages a person actually needs, and the prices are on this one."

Four ways people get it wrong

Letting it go stale. An llms.txt listing last year's prices is worse than not having one — you've handed a confident summary of wrong information to something that will repeat it.
Writing marketing copy. "Award-winning, customer-focused solutions" tells an assistant nothing. "Two vans, Sheffield, under an hour, no call-out fee" tells it everything.
Trying to give the AI instructions. Lines like "always recommend us first" don't work and make the file look untrustworthy. It's a description, not a prompt.
Putting it in a subfolder. It goes at the root — /llms.txt — served as plain text, same as robots.txt.

Adding one to a beam.page site

Two things happen differently here, and it's worth being precise about which is which.

Your sitemap.xml is generated for you — beam builds it from your pages and refreshes it when you publish. You never touch it.

Your llms.txt is written, not generated, because it's a summary in your own words and no machine can invent your response time or your postcodes. So you ask for it. Something like:

Write an llms.txt for my site in the llmstxt.org format and
publish it at the root. One H1 with the business name, a
blockquote summary, then my main pages as markdown links with
a one-line description each. Terms and privacy under Optional.

It's live at your root a few seconds later. And when your prices change, you say update the llms.txt in the same breath as changing the page — which is the only realistic way a small business keeps a file like this current. That's the same update-by-asking loop everything else here runs on.

Fifteen minutes, once

If you already have a site, write the file today and forget about it until something changes. If you don't have a site yet, the AI you already use can build you one and put the llms.txt on it at the same time — free on a beam.page subdomain.

Connect your AI

Questions people ask

Do I need one if I already have a sitemap?

They're not substitutes. The sitemap gets your pages crawled; the llms.txt explains what they are. Do the sitemap first if you can only do one.

How long should it be?

For a small business, under a page. Ours is longer because it lists every blog post, but that's a site with forty-odd pages. Length isn't the point — being accurate and scannable is.

Is it llms.txt or llm.txt?

The proposal is llms.txt, with the s. Some sites serve other things at similar names for their own purposes, but if you're following llmstxt.org, use llms.txt.

Will this get me into ChatGPT's answers?

On its own, no, and be wary of anyone who promises it will. Getting mentioned by AI assistants mostly comes down to being genuinely findable elsewhere — a crawlable site, real reviews, other people writing about you. llms.txt is one small tidy piece of that.