What is llms.txt and does your site need it?

When someone asks ChatGPT or Claude for a recommendation, the assistant often reads web pages to answer. Your site competes for that moment with other sites, and it also has to get past its own menus, cookie banners and scripts that get in the way of the actual content.

What goes in it#

llms.txt is a proposed standard: a Markdown file at the root of your domain, for example https://example.com/llms.txt. It starts with the name of the business and one or two sentences about it, followed by links to the most important pages, ideally to their clean Markdown versions.

# Example Furniture

> Garden furniture made in Poland, shipped across the EU.

## Products
- [Teak garden sets](https://example.com/md/en/teak-sets.md)
- [Delivery and returns](https://example.com/md/en/delivery.md)

What it does not do#

llms.txt does not guarantee that any assistant will quote you, and not every AI crawler reads it today. Still, it takes a few minutes and can't hurt, and assistants that do look for it get a straight list of your key pages.

What matters more#

The file only helps if the pages it lists are worth reading. These matter more:

• pages that answer real questions directly,
• a clean Markdown version of key pages,
• correct titles, canonical addresses and structured data.

How to add it#

Anole builds llms.txt from your sitemap and from the documents you publish, and checks whether your domain serves it. The deployment guide shows three ways to put it online, from uploading a file to a two-minute Google Tag Manager tag.