What llms.txt is
It is an emerging convention for publishing a plain-text guide to a site's most useful content, written for models rather than browsers. It does not grant or deny access. It is a courtesy, not a permission. Adoption is early and no engine treats it as required.
Think of it as a one-page summary of your business, in plain text, at a fixed address, that an AI can read in one go instead of piecing your site together.
Google says the same about its own AI features: "You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features."
What it is not
robots.txt is the access control file. Blanket rules written for older threats routinely refuse GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended by name, or refuse everything not explicitly permitted. The site owner is almost never aware of it. The two files are widely confused. If robots.txt turns an AI crawler away, no llms.txt will let it back in.
Check whether you already have one
Type your site address and add /llms.txt, like yoursite.com/llms.txt. If you see plain text describing your business, you have one. If you see an error page, you do not.
How to write one, if you want to
Open a plain text editor (Notepad on Windows, TextEdit on a Mac set to plain text) and write:
- 1.Your business name as a heading, with one sentence saying what you do and where.
- 2.A short paragraph: who you serve, what you sell, how to reach you.
- 3.A list of your most useful pages, one per line, each as a full address followed by a colon and a few words on what is there. Five to ten pages is plenty.
Keep it true and keep it current. A guide that points to pages you no longer have is worse than none. Save it as llms.txt.
Where to put it
It has to live at the root of your site, the same place as robots.txt.
- WordPress: upload it with your host's file manager into the same folder as wp-config.php, or use a plugin that publishes an llms.txt (several SEO plugins now do).
- Shopify: there is no root file upload; the practical route is a page at /pages/llms and a redirect from /llms.txt to it, set under Online Store, Navigation, URL redirects.
- Wix and Squarespace: neither lets you place a file at the root today. Skip it. It is a courtesy and its absence blocks nothing.
How Sai treats it
Sai checks for it, notes it, and does not claim that its absence blocks anything. Your access file, on the other hand, is one of the 11 checks in the free scan, because that is the one that decides.