Question 1

What is an llms.txt file, exactly?

Accepted Answer

It's a plain markdown file published at yoursite.com/llms.txt — an H1 with your site or product name, an optional one-sentence blockquote summary, then H2-headed lists of your most important pages as markdown links. It's meant to be a short, curated index an AI system can read in a single pass, not a full copy of your site.

Question 2

Do ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Google actually read llms.txt today?

Accepted Answer

Inconsistently, and no major vendor has publicly committed to crawling or prioritising it at inference time. The llms.txt proposal (llmstxt.org, 2024) is still an informal community convention rather than an adopted web standard. Plenty of docs-heavy sites publish one anyway — including this one — partly as low-cost insurance for whichever crawlers do respect it, and partly because writing it forces a genuinely useful one-paragraph summary of the site.

Question 3

How is llms.txt different from robots.txt and sitemap.xml?

Accepted Answer

robots.txt only tells crawlers what they may not fetch — it carries no information about what matters most. sitemap.xml lists every indexable URL with no priority or context, which is fine for a traditional crawler but expensive for an LLM working inside a limited context window. llms.txt is the opposite of both: a short, human-curated, priority-ordered list of the pages worth reading first.

Question 4

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

Accepted Answer

llms.txt is an index — titles, links, and one-line notes. llms-full.txt (an informal extension some sites also publish) inlines the actual page content under each entry, so a crawler can read everything in one request instead of following every link. This generator produces a skeleton for it — a placeholder block under each link — because it can't fetch and paste your live page content for you.

Question 5

Where do I upload the file this tool generates?

Accepted Answer

At the root of your domain, next to robots.txt and sitemap.xml — e.g. https://yoursite.com/llms.txt. It has to be a plain-text response at that exact path; a page that merely displays the text doesn't count.

Question 6

What does the "Optional" section heading mean?

Accepted Answer

It's a spec convention, not a label you have to use, but it's worth knowing: a section literally named "Optional" signals that a context-constrained reader can skip it first. Put lower-priority pages — changelog, blog, older docs — under a section called Optional and keep core docs elsewhere.

Question 7

Should links use absolute or relative URLs?

Accepted Answer

Absolute (https://yoursite.com/page), always. llms.txt files get copied, cached, and read out of context by tools that may not know your domain, so a relative /docs link is ambiguous outside your own site. Fill in the Site URL field above and this generator resolves relative paths for you automatically.

Question 8

How long should an llms.txt file be?

Accepted Answer

Short. The entire value of the format is that it costs an LLM almost no context budget to read. Ten to thirty links across three or four sections is a reasonable range for most sites; if you're listing everything on your sitemap, you've built a second sitemap.xml, not an llms.txt.

Question 9

Does adding llms.txt help or hurt regular Google SEO?

Accepted Answer

Neither, directly — it isn't a ranking signal Google's classic web index consults. It sits alongside SEO as a separate, AI-crawler-facing surface. The upside is indirect: writing it usually forces a clearer, more citable summary of what your site does, which tends to help AI Overviews and answer-engine citations more than it helps blue-link rankings.

Question 10

Can I publish more than one llms.txt, e.g. one per subdomain?

Accepted Answer

Yes — each subdomain (docs.yoursite.com, app.yoursite.com) can serve its own llms.txt scoped to that subdomain's content, the same way each subdomain can have its own robots.txt. Run this generator once per subdomain and set the Site URL field to that subdomain each time.

Line	Syntax	Required?	Purpose
Title	# Site Name	Required	Exactly one H1, first line of the file
Summary	> One-sentence summary	Recommended	Concise context an LLM can quote directly
Details	Plain paragraph, no heading	Optional	Extra freeform context — keep it terse
Section	## Section Name	1 or more	Groups related links; "Optional" is a reserved name meaning "skip first if short on context"
Link	- [Title](URL): note	1+ per section	A markdown link with an optional colon-separated note

llms.txt Generator

What is an llms.txt file?

Build your llms.txt

Site basics

Generated llms.txt

The format, line by line

Frequently asked questions