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](/content/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:

| File | llms.txt | robots.txt | sitemap.xml |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Job | Curate meaning | Control access | List every URL |
| Audience | AI systems & agents | Crawlers | Search engines |
| Format | Markdown | Directives | XML |
| Says | “Read these, here's why” | “You may / may not enter” | “Every page that exists” |

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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