AI Crawlers Are Reading Everything. Give Them Something Worth Reading.

Most people know what robots.txt does.

It's a simple file that sits at your domain and tells crawlers what they're allowed to see. Been around since the 90s. Standard practice. Every serious site has one.

llms.txt is the same idea.. applied to AI.

It's a plain text file at yourdomain.com/llms.txt that tells AI language models what your site is about, which pages matter, and how to accurately represent you when someone asks a question in your category.

Instead of an AI crawler inferring context from whatever it happens to find on your pages.. you're handing it a structured briefing. Here's who I am. Here's what I do. Here's what's worth reading. Here's how to cite me accurately.

Now.. full transparency..

llms.txt is an emerging standard. Not every AI crawler supports it yet. It's not a guaranteed fast track to being cited by ChatGPT. Anyone telling you otherwise is overselling it.

But here's the thing..

The cost of having one is essentially zero. A plain text file and 20 minutes.

And the people who have clean, structured, crawlable signals in place when support matures are going to have an advantage that compounds.. exactly the way early SEO investment did.

Worth doing while it's still early.

🚀

- James

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