What is llms.txt?
llms.txt is a text file placed at the root of a website that describes the site's content in a format optimized for large language models to read and cite. Modeled loosely on robots.txt, it offers AI systems a clean, structured overview of your most important pages and what they cover.
The file is typically written in plain Markdown and lists key URLs with short descriptions, helping a language model find and understand your best content without wading through navigation, ads, and clutter. It is a proposed standard, adopted voluntarily, that is gaining traction as AI search grows.
Placing an llms.txt at yoursite.com/llms.txt is a low-effort way to make your content more accessible to the AI tools that increasingly mediate how people find answers.
Why it matters
As AI search becomes a real traffic source, llms.txt is a simple, proactive step to make your content easier for these systems to surface and cite. It is cheap to implement and positions you ahead of competitors who have not adopted it.
Even though it is an emerging standard, getting it in place early costs little and can only help your odds of being referenced by AI engines.
How Distro helps
Distro's AI citation scanner checks for an llms.txt and other readiness signals, then includes fixing them in your missions so your site is set up to be cited. Get your free growth report to see what is missing.
Related terms
AI Citation
An AI citation is when an AI search engine like ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews references your website as a source in its generated answer.
robots.txt
robots.txt is a file at the root of a website that tells search engine crawlers and AI bots which pages they are allowed or not allowed to access.