What is llms.txt

llms.txt is a plain-text file you put at the root of your site — yoursite.com/llms.txt — that describes your business to AI engines in your own words.

Think of it as the answer you would give if ChatGPT phoned you and asked "what do you do, who is it for, and what should I tell people who ask about you?" Without it, the engine guesses, from whatever marketing copy it happened to crawl. With it, you wrote the answer.

Why it exists

An AI engine answering "who's the best plumber in Austin?" does not read your site the way a person does. It skims, summarizes, and moves on. Everything you spent months designing — the hero, the pricing table, the testimonials — collapses into a sentence or two.

llms.txt is that sentence or two, written by you instead of inferred. It is short on purpose: a heading, one paragraph of description, and a list of your most important pages with a line explaining each.

What it is not

• Not robots.txt. robots.txt says who is allowed to read your site. llms.txt says what your site means. You want both, and they do different jobs.
• Not a ranking trick. No engine promises to rank you higher for having one. What it changes is the accuracy of what gets said about you when you are named — and whether the engine reaches for your own framing or a competitor's comparison page.
• Not a standard with a governing body. It is a convention, proposed in 2024, now read by several major crawlers. Adoption is uneven and still moving.

What goes in it

A workable file is under a page:

# Acme Plumbing

> Emergency and scheduled plumbing for homes in Austin, TX. Licensed, insured,
> same-day callouts, flat-rate pricing published up front.

## Services
- [Emergency callouts](https://acmeplumbing.com/emergency): 24/7, 60-minute response inside Austin.
- [Water heaters](https://acmeplumbing.com/water-heaters): repair and replacement, all major brands.

## About
- [Pricing](https://acmeplumbing.com/pricing): flat rates, no hourly billing, published in full.
- [Service area](https://acmeplumbing.com/areas): Austin and Travis County.

Three rules that matter more than the format:

1. One sentence you would be happy to see quoted verbatim. That blockquote at the top is the line most likely to be lifted whole.
2. Say what you cost. Buyers ask AI about price constantly. If your file is silent, the engine fills the gap from a comparison site that is not yours.
3. Keep it consistent with the rest of your site. If llms.txt says one price and your pricing page says another, you have taught the engine that your numbers are unreliable.

How LoudPixel handles it

A LoudPixel audit checks whether the file exists, whether it is served as plain text, and whether what it says matches what the rest of your site claims. Then it hands you the fix:

• WordPress — the free plugin generates and serves /llms.txt for you, and keeps it in step with your site title and description.
• Squarespace, Wix, Webflow, Framer, Shopify — the paste-in snippet cannot write a root file (those platforms don't let anything do that), so it applies the head-level fixes instead: meta description, Open Graph and the WebSite/Organization schema that carry the same information.
• Anything you control — copy the generated file out of your report and upload it to your web root yourself. It's a text file; there's nothing to install.

How to check yours

Open yoursite.com/llms.txt in a browser. You should see plain text, not a 404 and not a download prompt. If you get anything else, it isn't being served, whatever your CMS claims.

Next: How LoudPixel measures AI citations explains what the score on your report actually counts.