Do I need an llms.txt file?

It's a proposed plain-text file at the root of a website that summarizes the site for AI systems, a bit like a table of contents written for machines. It's a community proposal, not an official web standard, and using it is voluntary. It's easy to confuse with robots.txt, which is different: robots.txt tells crawlers what they may access, and crawlers widely respect it.

SE Ranking's analysis, reported by Search Engine Journal in November 2025, found about 10% of domains had the file. Neither statistical tests nor its machine-learning model found a relationship with citation frequency, and removing llms.txt from the model made it more accurate. GPTBot fetched the files only occasionally. That's correlation data rather than a controlled experiment, so it can't rule out a future effect.

Google's guidance is direct: "You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features."

It took minutes to write and costs nothing to keep, and it's a tidy summary for any tool that does read it. We don't count it as evidence that this site is ready for AI, and we no longer list it as a core part of our service. If you'd like one, we'll add it. We just won't promise that it does anything.

Check that your robots.txt and firewall aren't blocking crawlers such as OAI-SearchBot, which OpenAI says is used to surface sites in ChatGPT search. Make sure your content is in the server-rendered HTML. State your services and service area in plain text, and make your listings agree. Those steps fix problems that demonstrably stop machines from reading you. If you're not sure where you stand, start with our free AI-Readiness Check.