FordeeGuide · AI Visibility
llms.txt, explained
There's a tiny file you can drop at the root of your site that tells AI engines exactly who you are and where everything lives. Most sites don't have one. Yours can, and it takes about ten minutes.
What llms.txt is
llms.txt is a plain-text file at the root of your site that tells AI engines, in their language, what your business is and where your most important pages live.
It sits at yoursite.com/llms.txt, just like robots.txt sits at the root. When an AI engine lands on your site or goes looking for context before answering a question about you, it can check that file. No crawling, no guessing, no piecing together clues from your homepage copy. You're handing it the summary directly.
The format is simple, plain text with a few markdown-style headings. No database, no plugin, no special hosting required. It's one file.
Does it actually work yet
It's a young standard, not a rule every AI obeys yet, but it's cheap to add and it makes your site easier to read for the engines that do use it.
Perplexity publishes its own llms.txt and its crawler fetches them. Other engines are moving in that direction at their own pace. Will every AI that mentions your business check the file first? Not yet. But the cost of adding it is about ten minutes of your time and zero dollars, so the trade-off is pretty easy to calculate.
And the engines that read these files reach real scale: ChatGPT alone hit 900 million weekly users by early 2026, on OpenAI's own count. A file that takes ten minutes to write is cheap insurance for an audience that size.
The bigger picture is that AI visibility is still young, and the sites that set up clean, readable signals now are the ones positioned well when the standards mature. This is one of those signals. Low effort, no downside.
What goes in it
A good llms.txt has four parts: a one-line description of who you are, a short summary paragraph, a list of your key pages with plain descriptions, and your contact.
It's one small file, but it hands AI more working context about your site than your homepage does.
Here's what mine looks like, trimmed down for the example:
# FordeeTV
> FordeeTV is a creative studio established in 2010, run by Fordee.
## Summary
FordeeTV designs and builds for brands that would rather stand out than blend in.
One-person studio covering both the build side (web, apps, design) and the growth
side (SEO, GEO, marketing, social, content).
## Key pages
- [Home](https://www.fordeetv.com/): studio overview, selected work, services, and contact
- [Plugin shop](https://www.fordeetv.com/shop/): Final Cut Pro and Motion plugins
- [AI Visibility](https://www.fordeetv.com/ai-visibility-audit/): GEO audit tool
- [Reef Run](https://www.fordeetv.com/game.html): a browser arcade game, built from scratch
## Contact
- Contact form: https://www.fordeetv.com/#contact
The heading is your business name. The line after the > is a single sentence that captures what you do. The summary expands on that in a short paragraph. The key pages section links to the pages that matter most and says plainly what each one is. Contact goes at the bottom.
How to make one
We'll write it in a plain text editor, save it as llms.txt, and drop it in your site's root folder so it lives at yoursite.com/llms.txt.
- Open a plain text editor. Notepad, TextEdit in plain-text mode, VS Code, whatever you have. Not Word, not Google Docs. Plain text only, no formatting.
- Paste in the four parts. Start with
# Your Business Name, then a one-liner after>, then a## Summarysection, a## Key pagessection with links and descriptions, and a## Contactsection at the bottom. Use the example above as your template. - Save the file as
llms.txt. Make sure there's no .txt.txt situation, just llms.txt with no other extension hiding at the end. - Upload it to your root directory. That's the same folder where your homepage lives, so the file ends up at
yoursite.com/llms.txt. Drop it in and you're done.
Want me to check the rest of your setup?
llms.txt is one piece of the AI visibility picture. The audit checks your structured data, site readability, citation signals, and more, then gives you a score with specific things to fix. Not a generic checklist, actual findings for your site.
Free check available.
I added llms.txt to this site the same week I ran my first AI audit, and I'm glad I didn't wait until everything else was perfect first.