How to Write an llms.txt for Your Business (With a Copy-Paste Template)

You've probably heard that AI can't properly "read" your website — that ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity are guessing at what your business does instead of getting it right. An llms.txt file is the fix. It's a small text file that hands AI models a clean summary of who you are and where the truth lives. Here's exactly how to write one.

What is an llms.txt file?

An llms.txt file is a plain-text file, written in Markdown, that sits at the root of your website and tells AI models what your business does and which pages to trust. Think of it as a cheat sheet you hand a large language model so it doesn't have to guess by scraping your cluttered homepage.

Your normal website is built for humans and search engines — full of navigation, pop-ups, scripts, and styling. AI models have to fight through all of that to figure out what you actually do. An llms.txt strips that away and says, in plain language: here's the business, here's what we offer, here are the pages that matter.

It's a proposed standard, not a rule enforced by Google. But it costs almost nothing to add, it can't hurt you, and it puts you ahead of the businesses AI is currently mis-describing.

Why does my business need one?

Because AI is increasingly the front door to your business, and right now it's describing you from whatever it can scrape. When someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity "who does X in my city," the model answers from its best guess of your site. If that guess is wrong, you lose the mention — and you never even see it happen.

An llms.txt lets you control the summary. You decide the one-line description of your business. You decide which pages get pointed to. You reduce the odds that a model invents a service you don't offer or misses the one you're known for.

This is the same problem our AI-native work solves at the operations layer — except here it's about being found and understood by AI, not run by it. If you want to see how AI currently reads your site, the free scan shows you in about 30 seconds.

What goes inside an llms.txt file?

A good llms.txt has a clear, predictable shape. It's Markdown, so headers use # and links use standard Markdown link syntax. Keep it lean — this is a map, not a manual. Here's the structure, in order:

1. An H1 title. Your business name on the first line, prefixed with a single #.
2. A blockquote summary. One or two sentences, prefixed with >, saying plainly what you do and who you serve.
3. Optional context. A few plain sentences of detail — your offer, your location, what makes you the right pick.
4. Sectioned link lists. Grouped under H2 headers like "## Core pages" or "## Docs," each a bulleted Markdown link with a short description.
5. An optional section. A "## Optional" header for pages a model can skip if it's short on room.

The rule that matters most

Write it for a smart reader who has never heard of you. No jargon, no internal acronyms, no marketing fog. If a stranger couldn't tell what you sell from your summary line, an AI model can't either. Plain, specific, and honest beats clever every time.

How do I write one? (copy-paste template)

Start from this template, swap in your real details, and you're most of the way there. Copy it into any plain-text editor, replace the bracketed parts, and save it as llms.txt.

• # Your Business Name — the H1 title line.
• > One-line summary — e.g. "> EverThrive AI is a founder-led AI consultancy that makes businesses AI-native and helps them get found by AI."
• A short paragraph — what you offer, who it's for, where you operate.
• ## Core pages — then bullets: - [Services](https://yoursite.com/services): what we do, - [About](https://yoursite.com/about): who we are, - [Contact](https://yoursite.com/contact): how to reach us.
• ## Optional — lower-priority links a model can skip, same bullet format.

That's the whole thing. Most solid business llms.txt files are shorter than this article. If you'd rather not hand-build it, the free llms.txt generator asks a few questions about your business and outputs the file ready to upload.

Where do I put the llms.txt file?

Put it at the root of your domain so it lives at yoursite.com/llms.txt — the exact same level as your robots.txt file. That's the one location AI tools look for it, so it has to be there and nowhere else.

The steps are simple regardless of your platform:

1. Save the file as llms.txt — lowercase, plain text, no .doc or .md extension.
2. Upload it to your site's root folder — the top level, not inside /blog or /pages.
3. Confirm it loads by visiting yoursite.com/llms.txt in a browser. You should see your plain text, not a 404.
4. Update it when your offer, key pages, or positioning change — a stale file misleads AI just as much as no file.

On WordPress, Webflow, or Framer you can usually add a file at the root through your hosting or site settings. On a custom site, drop it in the public root next to robots.txt. If you're stuck, that's the kind of thing our llms.txt + Schema Kit walks you through step by step.

Is llms.txt the same as robots.txt?

No — they do opposite jobs. robots.txt tells crawlers which pages they're allowed to access. llms.txt tells AI models what your business is and which pages to prioritize. One is a gate; the other is a guide.

They also work fine side by side. You keep robots.txt doing its access-control job and add llms.txt as the human-readable summary layer on top. Neither replaces schema markup either — structured data (JSON-LD) tells search engines and AI the machine-readable facts, while llms.txt gives them the plain-English overview. The strongest setup uses all three together.

Does llms.txt actually work?

Honest answer: it's a proposed standard, not a guarantee. It was introduced in 2024 and a growing number of AI tools and crawlers read it, but no single authority mandates it and adoption is still uneven. Anyone promising you a specific ranking bump from it is selling you something.

Here's why it's still worth doing. It takes minutes to write, it can't harm your SEO, and it's the cheapest way to influence how AI describes you instead of leaving it to chance. It's a low-cost bet on where search is clearly heading — toward AI answering for your business before a human ever clicks.

Treat it like early SEO in the 2000s. The operators who set it up before it was obvious got a head start that compounded. Same move here.

What's the fastest way to get this done?

If you just want the file, use the free llms.txt generator — answer a few questions, get a clean file, upload it. Done in minutes, no cost.

If you want to do it right — the llms.txt plus the schema markup that makes AI trust and cite you — the llms.txt + Schema Kit gives you the templates, the copy-paste code, and the setup steps for $97. And if you want to see how AI reads your business before you touch anything, run the free scan first. The businesses AI describes accurately aren't lucky. They told it what to say.