What llms.txt is and whether you need one

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llms.txt is one plain-text Markdown file at the root of your site (yourdomain.com/llms.txt) that gives AI systems a short, readable map of what you offer and where the key pages are. In October 2026 it is a proposed convention rather than a standard that every AI company honors, so treat it as cheap insurance, not a traffic channel.

What goes in it

A title, a one-line description of the site, and a short list of links to your most important pages, each with a sentence about what the reader will find there.

# Your Product
> One sentence on what it does and who it is for.

## Key pages
- [Pricing](https://yourdomain.com/pricing): Plans and what each includes.
- [How it works](https://yourdomain.com/how-it-works): The product in five minutes.

Why bother

It costs an hour, it gives any system that does read it a clean summary, and it forces you to decide which pages matter most.

Be honest about the limits

A file that points at pages crawlers cannot read does nothing. llms.txt helps only when the pages behind it are visible and indexed (see the JavaScript and indexing guides).

What this does not tell you

Which pages to list for your type of site, how to make crawlers find the file, and how to keep it current as your site changes.