# What is llms.txt and do you need one?

Canonical: https://seangarschi.com/answers/what-is-llms-txt

Updated 2026-08-19. Category: GEO & SEO.

llms.txt is a markdown file at your site root that gives language models a curated map of your most important pages in plain text. It is a proposed convention rather than an official standard, costs almost nothing to add, and makes your site cheaper for an assistant to understand.

## What it actually is

A single markdown file, served at /llms.txt, listing your key URLs with a one-line description of each and a short summary of what the site is. Many implementations pair it with /llms-full.txt, which contains the full plain text of the important pages in one request.

Think of it as a sitemap written for a reader rather than a crawler: prioritised, described, and stripped of navigation.

## An honest assessment

No major assistant has publicly committed to reading it, and anyone claiming a measured ranking benefit is guessing. What it does reliably is force you to articulate, in one file, what your site is and which twenty pages matter, an exercise that improves the site whether or not a model ever fetches the file.

It takes an hour and costs nothing, so add one.

## Related questions

**Is llms.txt an official standard?**

No. It is a community proposal that has been widely adopted by documentation sites and developer tools, without formal endorsement from any major model provider.

**Where does llms.txt go?**

At the root of your domain, at /llms.txt, served as plain text or markdown.

**What is the difference between llms.txt and llms-full.txt?**

llms.txt is an index of links with descriptions. llms-full.txt contains the actual full text of those pages, so an assistant can ingest the whole site in a single request.

Source: https://seangarschi.com/answers/what-is-llms-txt
Contact: start@growthr.com