What Is llms.txt, and Should Your Business Have One?
You already know robots.txt - the file that tells search crawlers what they can access. llms.txt is its younger sibling for the AI era: a plain-language file at yourwebsite.com/llms.txt that gives AI models a clean, structured summary of your business. When ChatGPT or Perplexity tries to understand who you are, this file hands them the answer instead of making them guess from your homepage design.
Why it matters for local businesses
AI assistants increasingly answer "who should I hire" questions directly. They build those answers from whatever information they can find and verify. A website with clear structured data and an llms.txt gives them verifiable facts: your services, your service area, your contact info, your prices if you publish them. A website without one forces the AI to interpret marketing copy - and businesses that are hard to interpret get left out of answers.
What goes in it
The format is simple markdown: a heading with your business name, a one-line summary, then short sections. For a local business, cover who you are and who runs the business, the services you offer with links to the relevant pages, the areas and zip codes you serve, pricing if you are comfortable publishing it, and how to reach you - full name, address, and phone, matching your Google Business Profile exactly.
The honest caveats
llms.txt is an emerging standard, not a guarantee. Not every AI system reads it yet, and nobody should promise you it will transform your visibility overnight. But the cost is one hour and zero dollars, the downside is nothing, and it forces you to write the clear, consistent business summary that helps every other channel too. That risk-reward ratio is why we recommend it to every client.
How to publish yours
Write the file in any plain text editor, name it llms.txt, and upload it to your website's root folder - the same place robots.txt lives. Test it by visiting yourwebsite.com/llms.txt in a browser. That's it. We run one on this very site at appdore.com/llms.txt if you want a working example to copy the structure from.
Want to know whether AI can find your business at all? Our free guide on checking your AI visibility walks through it in 15 minutes, or our tool DidItIndex runs the full 41-check scan for you.