---
title: "What is llms.txt? | TauX"
description: "What llms.txt is, what it expresses that robots.txt cannot, and an honest account of its status: a proposal in use, not a ratified standard."
url: "https://taux.io/en-US/what-is-llms-txt"
locale: "en-US"
alternates:
  ja-JP: "https://taux.io/ja-JP/what-is-llms-txt"
  ko-KR: "https://taux.io/ko-KR/what-is-llms-txt"
  zh-Hans-CN: "https://taux.io/zh-Hans-CN/what-is-llms-txt"
  zh-Hant-TW: "https://taux.io/zh-Hant-TW/what-is-llms-txt"
---

# 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? ▼ 

No. It is a proposal in active use rather than a ratified standard, and most crawlers still take their access rules from robots.txt. 

What happens if you do not have one? ▼ 

Nothing immediate. Your content simply keeps being read and used on whatever terms the reader assumes. 

Will models actually honour it? ▼ 

That depends entirely on the operator, and it is voluntary. The firmer commitments today are to the AI user-agents declared in robots.txt. 

## Want your content read on your terms?

We can set up the GEO strategy and the protocol files that go with it.

[Get in touch](mailto:hello@taux.io)