What Is llms.txt? The Complete Guide (+ How to Create One) · TinyCommand

When an AI tool wants to understand your site, it has two options: crawl every page and infer what you do, or read a short file where you just tell it. llms.txt is that file. It is the simplest item in the “machine-readable web” toolkit, it takes ten minutes, and we run one ourselves at tinycommand.com/llms.txt.

What Is llms.txt?

Short answer. llms.txt is a markdown file at the root of your site (yoursite.com/llms.txt) that gives AI systems a curated map of your most important pages. Instead of forcing a model to crawl and guess, you hand it a short, structured list of what you offer and where the key pages are. The standard was proposed in 2024 at llmstxt.org.

The format is deliberately tiny: an H1 with your name, a one-line summary, then a few sections of links with a sentence of context each. That is the whole spec. Its job is curation: you decide what an AI should pay attention to, in a file a model can read in one gulp without rendering JavaScript or fighting your navigation.

llms.txt vs robots.txt vs sitemap.xml

People conflate these three because they all live at the site root. They do different jobs:

A healthy site has all three. robots.txt is the bouncer, sitemap.xml is the full index, and llms.txt is the curated reading list for the AI layer on top.

What an llms.txt File Looks Like

Here is a trimmed version of a real one. Notice it is just headings and annotated links.

yoursite.com/llms.txt

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## Products
- [Forms](https://acme.com/forms): Forms that verify and branch as people fill them in.
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