What is LLMs.txt
“llms.txt is robots.txt for language models — a plain text file that says which parts of a site are open to them and what they may do with what they find.”
01
What is llms.txt?
It exists so a site owner can state intent rather than guess at it: whether training, summarising, rewriting and quoting are welcome. It is not a ratified standard, and saying otherwise would be overselling it — but the need behind it is real, and it is the clearest articulation so far of how sites want AI to treat what they publish.
Against robots.txt: what is actually different
| Dimension | robots.txt | LLMs.txt |
|---|---|---|
| Who it addresses | Search crawlers (Googlebot) | Language models — training and answering |
| What it governs | Fetching. Allow or disallow | Use. Training, rewriting, quoting |
| What it is for | Managing what gets indexed | Rights, and the terms of AI use |
02
What goes in it
A minimal example
# Title
> Optional description goes here
## Section name
- [Link title](https://link_url): Optional details
## Optional
- [Link title](https://link_url)Beyond the basics
- Who you are. State the core service in a sentence a model can quote back.
- Notes for the model. Where the content applies, which version it describes, and that attribution is expected.
- Structure. Group pages — guides, services — so a model can tell what kind of page it is reading.
03
Why bother
Rights over your own work
Original work absorbed into training and regenerated elsewhere is hard to notice and harder to undo.
Privacy and exposure
Declare the areas that should stay out — user-generated content, anything sensitive.
Being quoted correctly
Clear guidance reduces the odds of a model paraphrasing you into something you did not say.
Crawl load
A place to signal limits on large-scale automated fetching.
04
Common questions
Is llms.txt a standard yet? ▼
What happens if you do not have one? ▼
Will models actually honour it? ▼
Want your content read on your terms?
We can set up the GEO strategy and the protocol files that go with it.