How to Write an llms.txt File With Markdown Summaries, Key URLs, Product Docs, and FAQs

What does the llms.txt format require?

The proposal, published by Jeremy Howard of Answer.AI in September 2024, specifies a file at /llms.txt containing, in this order:

1. An H1 with the name of the project or site. This is the only required section.
2. A blockquote with a short summary containing the key information needed to understand the rest of the file.
3. Optional details: paragraphs or lists, but no headings, explaining how to interpret the links.
4. H2 sections of "file lists": each item is a Markdown link, optionally followed by a colon and a note.
5. An "## Optional" section, by convention, for secondary links an agent can skip when it needs a shorter context.

The proposal also suggests offering clean Markdown versions of key pages at the same URL with .md added, and linking to them from llms.txt. Pages can point to their Markdown version with rel="alternate" type="text/markdown", and to the llms.txt file that covers them with rel="describedby".

What does a good llms.txt look like?

A template for a small software company:

# Northwind Scheduling

> Northwind is appointment scheduling software for clinics with 1 to 50
> practitioners. It handles online booking, reminders, waitlists and payments,
> and integrates with major practice management systems. Plans start at $29
> per practitioner per month.

Northwind is used mainly by physiotherapy, dental and counselling clinics in
the UK, US and Canada. Pricing and features below are current; the changelog
lists recent changes.

## Product
- [Product overview](/product.md): What Northwind does and who it is for
- [Pricing](/pricing.md): Plans, limits and what each includes
- [Integrations](/integrations.md): Supported practice management and payment systems
- [Security and compliance](/security.md): Data hosting, encryption and certifications

## Docs
- [Getting started](/docs/start.md): Setup in under an hour
- [API reference](/docs/api.md): Endpoints, authentication and rate limits

## Customers
- [Case study: Harbour Physio](/customers/harbour.md): 38% fewer no-shows after six months

## FAQ
- [Frequently asked questions](/faq.md): Contracts, data export, cancellations

## Optional
- [Blog](/blog.md): Product news and guides
- [Changelog](/changelog.md): Release history

The links are shortened to paths here for readability; in your live file, use full URLs, such as https://yourdomain.com/pricing.md, so any tool can follow them. The summary does most of the work. It should say what you are, who you serve, what you do and roughly what it costs, in plain sentences that stand alone if nothing else is read.

What should a SaaS company include in llms.txt: product docs, pricing, and success stories?

Include the pages an assistant or agent needs to answer a buyer or a developer accurately:

• Product overview and main use cases.
• Pricing, with plan names, limits and what each includes, since this is what assistants most often get wrong.
• Documentation: getting started, key guides and the API reference.
• Integrations and supported platforms.
• Security and compliance: certifications, data residency and policies.
• Customer stories with concrete results, which give assistants evidence to cite.
• Comparisons with alternatives, if you publish fair ones.
• FAQ and support: contracts, cancellations, data export.
• Changelog, in the Optional section, so agents can check what is current.

Leave out pages that add noise, such as tag archives, login pages and thin marketing pages. The file is a curated list, not a sitemap.

How to use llms-full.txt to help AI find deep assets

llms-full.txt is a convention that sits alongside the proposal rather than inside it. Documentation platforms such as Mintlify generate it automatically, combining the text of an entire documentation site into one Markdown file. Coding assistants and agents can load it in one request instead of following dozens of links. Use it when:

• Your documentation is large and developers work with it inside AI coding tools.
• Content is text-heavy and stable enough that one file stays accurate.

Keep it generated from the source, not written by hand, so it never drifts from the live docs. For a marketing site or a small business, llms-full.txt adds little; a concise llms.txt with links is enough.

What free llms.txt generators can create a file for your website?

The llmstxt.org site lists several integrations:

• Documentation platforms: Mintlify generates llms.txt and Markdown versions of every page it hosts; GitBook serves llms.txt for published docs.
• WordPress plugins: Yoast SEO generates and maintains an llms.txt file, and AIOSEO includes a generator.
• Website builders: Wix automatically generates and maintains an llms.txt file for sites on a paid plan with a connected custom domain; once you edit it, it stops updating until you reset it to default.
• Developer tools: plugins for VitePress and Docusaurus, a Drupal recipe, and libraries such as llms-txt-php.

Generated files are a starting point. Review them: many list every page, which defeats the purpose of a curated summary, and few write a good blockquote on their own.

How do you validate llms.txt formatting and links?

Check four things:

1. It loads. https://yourdomain.com/llms.txt should return status 200 as plain text, not an HTML page, a redirect to the homepage or a 404.
2. The structure parses. The first line is an H1, followed by a blockquote, and every link sits in a list under an H2. The llms-txt Python package from Answer.AI includes a command-line tool, llms_txt2ctx, that parses a file and expands it into context files; if it reads your file cleanly, the structure is right.
3. Every link works. Test each URL for a 200 response. Broken links undermine the file's purpose.
4. Facts are current. Check prices, plan names and product descriptions against the live site, and update the file whenever they change.

Also check that your robots.txt and firewall do not block the tools you want to read the file, and that the Markdown versions of pages, if you offer them, match the HTML pages.

Does llms.txt help AI search visibility?

Probably not much, for search engines. Google's guide to AI features says Google Search does not use llms.txt or other special AI files, and that it is fine to keep one for other services. Google's John Mueller has repeated that Google does not use it. No major AI search provider has said its crawler reads the file to rank or cite pages. Where llms.txt does help is with coding assistants, agents and tools that fetch it deliberately, such as developer documentation loaded into an IDE. More on what it can and cannot do is in whether llms.txt works like robots.txt, and Google's position in Google's GEO guide review.

What might this look like in practice?

Consider an illustrative API company, Relaypoint, whose developer customers kept getting outdated code examples from AI coding assistants. Relaypoint published an llms.txt with a four-sentence summary, links to Markdown versions of its quick start, authentication guide and API reference, and its changelog under Optional. Its docs platform generated an llms-full.txt from the same source. The team checked every link, confirmed the file parsed with llms_txt2ctx, and added a step to its release process to regenerate both files. Support tickets about deprecated endpoints fell over the following quarter.

What do people ask about writing llms.txt?

Where does llms.txt go?

At the root of your site: https://yourdomain.com/llms.txt.

Is anything required in llms.txt?

Only an H1 with the name of the site or project. The summary and link sections are recommended.

Does Google use llms.txt?

No. Google says its Search, including AI features, does not use it.

Should links point to HTML or Markdown pages?

The proposal recommends Markdown versions where you can provide them; HTML links work if you cannot.