llms.txt Generator

A proposed convention, put forward by Jeremy Howard of Answer.AI in 2024, for a Markdown file at yourdomain.com/llms.txt. It has an H1 with the site name, a short blockquote summary, and sections of links with one-line descriptions pointing to the pages you most want a language model to read. Think of it as a curated reading list for AI rather than a rulebook.

Google says its Search features, including AI Overviews and AI Mode, don’t use it, and that adding one won’t help or hurt your rankings there. OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity haven’t publicly committed to reading it when they answer questions either. Some developer tools and documentation workflows do use it. It’s cheap to add and low risk, but don’t expect it to move your citations on its own.

robots.txt says what crawlers may fetch. sitemap.xml lists every URL you want indexed. llms.txt is a short, hand-picked reading list in Markdown, with a description for each link. It doesn’t grant or deny access to anything. It just points a model at your best pages.

Your best evergreen pages: what you do, pricing, docs, key guides, about and FAQ. Leave out login pages, thin pages and near-duplicates, and keep the list short (a couple of dozen links at most). The generated draft pulls links from your homepage navigation, so reorder them and add a short description after each one, like “- [Pricing](url): what each plan includes”.

At the root of your domain: https://yourdomain.com/llms.txt, returning a 200 status as plain text or Markdown. Open that URL in a browser to confirm it loads. Update it whenever you add or remove a key page, and this tool will tell you if a file already exists so you can compare it with the fresh draft.

No. A report queries AI engines directly with your prompts; it doesn’t read your llms.txt. The file is a courtesy to the engines themselves, not an input ContextOwl depends on.

No, keep it short and curated — your best evergreen pages, not a full sitemap. A long, unfiltered list defeats the point of a hand-picked reading list.