llms.txt: is it worth adding to your site?

Every few years the web picks up a new file at a well-known address. robots.txt told crawlers where not to go. sitemap.xml told them what exists. Now there's llms.txt, a proposal for telling AI tools what your site is about.

I've been asked about it a lot lately, so here's a plain answer.

What it is

llms.txt is a Markdown file at the root of your site, like iconfyra.com/llms.txt. It gives a short description of who you are and links to your most useful pages, each with a line explaining what it covers.

The idea is that an AI tool reading your site gets a curated map written by you, instead of trying to work out what matters from your navigation and footer.

A simple one looks like this:

# Iconfyra

> An icon font for modern websites, embedded from the CDN or hosted yourself.

## Docs
- [Getting started](https://iconfyra.com/docs): Install the font and add your first icon
- [Self-hosting](https://iconfyra.com/docs/self-host): Serve the font from your own servers
- [Styling icons](https://iconfyra.com/docs/styling): Size and color icons with CSS

## Product
- [Pricing](https://iconfyra.com/pricing): Free, then from $2.99 a month

What it isn't

I want to be careful here, because there's a lot of hype around it.

• It's a proposal, not a standard. No major AI company has committed to reading it the way search engines read sitemaps.
• It's not a ranking factor. Adding one won't make ChatGPT recommend you.
• It doesn't control access. That's still robots.txt's job. llms.txt is a guide, not a gate.

So is it worth it?

My honest take: if you have documentation, a knowledge base, or a lot of content, yes. It takes twenty minutes to write, costs nothing to host, and some AI tools and coding assistants do already use these files when they're pointed at a site. Writing it is also a useful exercise in itself: if you can't summarize your site in a paragraph and ten links, that tells you something.

If you have a five-page brochure site, it's probably not worth the bother yet.

Tips if you write one

• Write the summary for a stranger. One or two sentences that would make sense to someone who's never heard of you.
• Link your best pages, not all of them. It's a curated list. Your sitemap already covers everything.
• Describe each link. "Pricing" tells a reader nothing. "Free, then from $2.99 a month" tells them a lot.
• Keep it current. An llms.txt that links to pages you've deleted is worse than none.

We publish one ourselves at webrankpage.com/llms.txt, if you'd like an example. And WebRankPage reports check whether a site has one, in the Crawling & indexing section, while the AI & answer readiness section shows which AI crawlers your robots.txt lets in.