GLOSSARY
llms.txt
- llms.txt
- llms.txt is a proposed root-level file that gives LLM crawlers a curated, markdown-formatted map of a site's best content. Adoption ran ahead of evidence: Google confirmed in June 2026 that Search ignores it, and about 97% of published llms.txt files are never fetched by any AI crawler. We ship one anyway — cheap, honest about why.
The proposal is reasonable on its face: give language models a concise index of your important pages in a format they parse cleanly, the way robots.txt gives crawlers rules. A minimal file looks like:
# Example Consultancy
> AI search visibility, measured monthly.
## Services
- [AI Visibility Audit](https://example.com/services/ai-visibility-audit): fixed-scope baseline
## Reference
- [Glossary](https://example.com/glossary): plain-English definitionsThe evidence, however, is unambiguous. Google's documentation confirmed in June 2026 that Search — including AI Overviews — ignores llms.txt entirely; it neither helps nor harms rankings (Digital Applied). Adoption studies across hundreds of thousands of domains found roughly 97% of llms.txt files are never fetched by any AI crawler, with no statistical citation effect (OrganiKPI).
What actually governs AI-search access is your robots.txt policy toward AI crawlers and whether your pages are worth retrieving once fetched — see extraction.