Insights · Field note 02
A small file with an outsized amount of hype. The honest version: useful hygiene, not magic, and worth doing for what it signals about the rest of your site.
llms.txt is a plain-text file — a cousin of robots.txt — that offers AI tools a clean, human-readable map of your site. It is an emerging convention, not a guaranteed input to any model's training pipeline.
On its own it will not vault you into ChatGPT's answers. But businesses that publish a good one almost always have the other signals in order too, and it costs nothing to get right. The discipline it imposes — stating your facts in machine-plain language — is the whole game.
The danger is a vendor who sells the file as the cure. The file is a symptom of doing the work; it is not the work.
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