Where does the llms.txt file come from?
The format was proposed in September 2024 by Jeremy Howard, co-founder of Answer.AI. The idea: web pages are full of elements that are useless to an AI (menus, scripts, ads). A short Markdown file would give it the essentials directly, with links to the reference pages.
What does an llms.txt file contain?
- A title: the name of the website or company.
- A summary in a few sentences.
- Sections of links to the key pages, each with a short description.
- Optionally, a second file, llms-full.txt, with the full content.
Do AI tools actually read llms.txt?
Nothing proves it so far. No major AI provider has publicly committed to using it as a reference. Several SEO specialists consider it useless for GEO, such as SeoMix in June 2026. Others recommend it as a cheap precaution.
It is sometimes confused with an access-control tool. That is not its role: allowing or blocking AI crawlers is done in the robots.txt file.
Why Linker has one anyway
Linker publishes an llms.txt file (linker-agency.com/llms.txt). It takes a few hours, carries no risk, and forces you to write a clear official description of the company, its services and its reference pages. That work is useful elsewhere: boilerplate, profiles, “about” pages.
But its weight remains small compared with what third-party sources say. Coverage in a recognised outlet or a place in a comparison article influences AI answers far more.
To go further
llms.txt is one tool among others in GEO. What actually triggers an AI citation is detailed in the corresponding entry.
Last updated: October 2026
