Skip to content
Citable

Definition

llms.txt

llms.txt is a proposed convention for a Markdown file at the root of a website (/llms.txt) that gives large language models a curated, plain-text overview of the site: a title, a short summary, and sections of links to the most important pages with one-line descriptions. A companion file, llms-full.txt, contains the full text of those pages in one document.

The format is deliberately simple so that a model can read it without a parser: an H1 with the site name, a blockquote with a summary, optional free-text paragraphs, and H2 sections containing Markdown link lists of the form - [Title](url): description. An ## Optional section marks links that can be skipped when context is limited.

This site publishes both /llms.txt and /llms-full.txt, generated from the CMS on every content change.

Frequently asked questions

Who proposed llms.txt?

Jeremy Howard of Answer.AI published the proposal at llmstxt.org in September 2024. It is a community convention, not a web standard, and no major AI provider has publicly committed to reading it.

Is llms.txt the same as robots.txt?

No. robots.txt tells crawlers what they may fetch; llms.txt tells a model what your site contains and where the best pages are. They are complementary.

Related terms

Guides that use this term

  • Technical

    llms.txt: what it is, how to write one, and whether it helps

    llms.txt is a proposed convention, published by Jeremy Howard of Answer.AI in September 2024, for a Markdown file at /llms.txt that gives language models a curated index of a site: an H1 title, a blockquote summary and H2 sections of links with one-line descriptions. No major AI provider has confirmed reading it, but it costs almost nothing to generate from a CMS and is widely published by documentation sites.

    8 min read