AI search · 6 min read
What is llms.txt and should your UK website have one?
A plain-English guide to the llms.txt file — what it is, what it does for AI crawlers, and whether your small business website needs one in 2026.
By Jack Frampton, Multi-Channel Marketer at Queen's College, Taunton · Published 30 June 2026
llms.txt is to AI crawlers what robots.txt is to search engines — a simple text file at the root of your site that tells large language models which content to read and cite. Here's what it does and how to write one.
What llms.txt actually does
It lists your canonical, high-priority URLs in Markdown so LLM crawlers can ingest your site efficiently. It's a hint, not a hard directive — adoption is voluntary, but Anthropic, Perplexity and others read it.
A minimal llms.txt template
# Your Brand
> One-line description of your business.
## Core pages
- [Home](https://example.co.uk/)
- [Services](https://example.co.uk/services)
- [About](https://example.co.uk/about)
## Articles
- [Article title](https://example.co.uk/blog/slug)Should you have one?
If you publish content you want cited (blog posts, guides, case studies) — yes. It costs nothing, adds no risk, and improves the chance of clean citations from generative engines.
What it doesn't do
It doesn't block scraping (use robots.txt and headers for that), doesn't guarantee citation, and doesn't replace schema or structured data.
Frequently asked questions
- Where does llms.txt live?
- At the root of your domain, e.g. https://example.co.uk/llms.txt — same as robots.txt.
- Is llms.txt an official standard?
- Not yet. It's a community proposal that's been adopted informally by several AI platforms. Treat it as a useful convention, not a formal protocol.
- Will llms.txt help my SEO?
- Indirectly — by improving the quality of citations from AI answer engines, which increasingly drive referral traffic.
- Does llms.txt stop AI from scraping my site?
- No. To block AI crawlers use robots.txt with directives like User-agent: GPTBot or User-agent: ClaudeBot.