There is a small text file you can add to a website that exists purely for AI assistants. It is called llms.txt, it lives at yoursite.com/llms.txt, and it is essentially a welcome document for machines: here is who we are, here is what we do, here are our pages and what each one contains.
Most business owners have never heard of it. Most web designers have not either. So here is the plain version.
The problem it solves
When an AI assistant reads a website, it has to reconstruct the business from scattered pieces: a tagline here, a price there, a service list behind a menu, an address in the footer. Websites are built for human eyes and human patience, and machines reading them do a lot of guessing.
llms.txt removes the guessing. It is a single page of plain text that states the facts in order: the business name, what it offers, who it serves, where it operates, what it charges, and an annotated list of the site’s pages. An assistant that finds it gets the whole picture in one read, in a format designed to be read by exactly the thing reading it.
What actually goes in one
A good llms.txt for a service business reads like a well-organized briefing. A one-paragraph summary at the top. The services, each with a sentence of description. Pricing, if you publish it, and you probably should. The answers to your most common questions. Then the page list, where each link gets a short note about what the page contains, so a machine knows which page answers which question without opening all of them.
The discipline matters more than the format: everything in the file must match what the site itself says. Assistants cross check, and a file that contradicts the pages it describes hurts more than no file at all.
Honest answer: is it required?
No. llms.txt is a young convention, not a standard, and adoption among AI companies is uneven and changing. Some crawlers read it today, others ignore it. Anyone telling you this one file will transform your AI visibility is overselling it.
Here is why I add it to every site anyway. The cost is nearly zero: one text file, updated when the site changes. The bet is asymmetric: if assistants use it, you handed them a perfect summary; if they do not, you lost an hour. And writing it is a useful exercise in itself, because if you struggle to state plainly what your business does and for whom, that problem is also on your website, where it is costing you far more. What genuinely moves AI visibility is the deeper work, being the kind of source assistants trust, and llms.txt is one modest layer of it.
How to check and how to get one
Type your domain followed by /llms.txt into a browser. If you get a page of organized text about your business, you have one. If you get an error, you do not, and neither do most of your competitors, which is exactly why the cheap layers are worth doing now rather than after everyone else.
Every site I build at Studio Squalli ships with llms.txt alongside the rest of the machine-readable layer, and this site eats its own cooking: studiosqualli.com/llms.txt is live and you can read it. The free audit checks whether your site has this layer and what else is keeping AI assistants from finding you.