Glossary · Traffic · also llms.txt file
What is llms.txt?
llms.txt is a proposed convention for a Markdown file at the root of a website, at /llms.txt, that gives large language models a short summary of the site and links to the pages most worth reading. Jeremy Howard proposed it in September 2024. It is not a formal standard, and it supplements robots.txt, sitemaps and structured data rather than replacing them.
- Reviewed 6 October 2026
In more detail
The file is written for a model reading at the moment it answers, not for a crawler building an index. The proposal sets a simple shape: a title, a short summary, then sections of links with a brief note on each.
Support among AI providers is uneven, so its value is as cheap insurance rather than as a guaranteed route into answers. The rules that decide whether an AI crawler may fetch a page at all still live in robots.txt.
For a store, the useful content is what an assistant gets wrong without help: shipping regions and costs, returns terms, sizing guidance and the collections that matter.
Key points
- A Markdown file at /llms.txt.
- A proposal, not a formal standard.
- Complements robots.txt and structured data; does not control crawler access.
How Liftable relates
Sources
- llmstxt.org. The /llms.txt proposal, published by Jeremy Howard of Answer.AI in September 2024.
Related terms
Guides that go deeper
Last reviewed against the product on 6 October 2026.
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