llms.txt, and whether it is worth your time

There is a proposed convention called llms.txt. The idea is simple. You place a plain markdown file at the root of your site that tells AI systems, in a clean and compact form, what your site is about and where the important pages live. Think of it as a readme written for machines that are in a hurry.

It is easy to oversell. No major model has promised to obey it, and nobody should expect llms.txt alone to lift a brand into the answers. The value is quieter. Writing one forces you to state plainly what you do and which pages matter, and that clarity tends to improve the rest of your site. The file itself is cheap to produce and costs nothing to keep.

A good one is short. A sentence or two on what the company is, then a tidy list of the pages you would want a model to read first, each with a short note on what it contains. No marketing throat-clearing, no keyword stuffing. Just the facts a machine would need to describe you correctly.

Treat it as hygiene rather than strategy. Ship it, keep it current, and spend the real effort on being findable and quotable. If the convention catches on, you are ready. If it does not, you have lost an afternoon and gained a clearer map of your own site.