What llms.txt actually is
llms.txt is a markdown file served at the root of your domain, yourbusiness.co.nz/llms.txt, following a simple public standard: a heading with your business name, a one-paragraph summary, a list of key facts, and sections of links to your important pages, each with a one-line description. It exists because AI crawlers work under constraints: they read raw text, they don't execute JavaScript, and they budget how much of your site they process. llms.txt hands them the executive summary.
Does it actually do anything?
Honest answer: it's early, and adoption by each AI engine varies. What we can say from practice: it costs almost nothing, it can't hurt, and it is the only place you get to author your business's summary in exactly the form AI systems prefer to consume. The businesses adopting it now are the same ones that adopted schema early, and early schema adopters own a disproportionate share of today's AI citations. We treat it as cheap insurance with upside.
What a good llms.txt contains
- Who you are, in one paragraph: trade or profession, locations, credentials
- Key facts as a list: service areas, hours, phone, pricing ranges if you publish them, licences
- Your important pages with one-line descriptions: services, cost guides, FAQs, contact
- Nothing else: it is a curated reading list, not a sitemap dump
How we set one up last week (a real example)
For an Auckland building company client we wrote an llms.txt covering their services, service areas, typical project pricing, and their cost guides, about 60 lines of markdown. Two rules made it useful rather than decorative: every fact in the file matches the website and Google Business Profile exactly (AI engines cross-check, and inconsistency costs trust), and every new guide published gets a line added, so the file stays the canonical reading list.
How to host it
Webflow: now supports llms.txt natively, Site Settings has a dedicated upload field. Upload, publish, done. WordPress: place the file in your site root via your host's file manager, or use one of the emerging plugins. Wix and Squarespace: no native root-file support at the time of writing; you may need a redirect workaround, one of several reasons platform choice matters for AEO, which we cover in our guide to AEO-ready website builders.
The two mistakes to avoid
First, contradicting your own website: if llms.txt says your kitchen renovations start at $20,000 and your site says $30,000, you've manufactured distrust. Keep one source of truth and mirror it. Second, writing it once and forgetting it: a stale llms.txt that omits your newest services quietly misinforms every AI that reads it. Update it whenever the site materially changes.
We write and maintain llms.txt as part of our AEO service, alongside the schema and content that make it worth reading.
