What is llms.txt, and does your small business website need one?
llms.txt is a plain text file at the root of a website, for example yoursite.com/llms.txt, that gives AI assistants a short, structured summary of your site. It was proposed in 2024 by Jeremy Howard of Answer.AI as a simple way to help large language models find the most useful pages.
What goes in it
A heading with your business name, a one or two sentence summary, then lists of your important pages with short descriptions, written in Markdown. For a local business, key facts such as your services, service area, hours and contact details are the most useful part.
Do AI tools actually read it?
Some do and some do not yet; it is a proposal, not an official standard. Google has not said it uses it. That is why it should be cheap and low effort: an accurate file does no harm, and it may help an AI assistant answer “who does pest control in Airdrie?” with your correct details.
The real problem: keeping it current
A hand-written llms.txt goes stale as soon as you add a page or change your hours. Ravalak AI SEO (free) rebuilds it every day from your published pages. Ravalak AI SEO Pro adds your homepage FAQ and recent posts, and submits changed pages through IndexNow to Bing, Yandex, Seznam and Naver.
Learn more on the llms.txt WordPress plugin page, or see ours at ravalak.ca/llms.txt.
