# Llms Txt > Write and validate an llms.txt file — the /llms.txt convention that gives AI assistants a clean, curated map of a site instead of leaving them to guess from HTML. Covers the required format, what belongs in it and what does not, the optional llms-full.txt companion, and where to put both. Use when the user says "llms.txt", "llms-full.txt", "AI crawler file", "help AI understand my site", "make my site readable to ChatGPT", or is preparing a site to be cited by AI assistants. - Skill: `kraayenjon/llms-txt` (Agent Skill) - Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add kraayenjon/llms-txt` - Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/kraayenjon/llms-txt/raw - Safety review: pending - Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex - Category: Web & Frontend - Author: kraayenjon (https://skillmd.com/u/kraayenjon) - Updated: 2026-09-17 - Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/kraayenjon/llms-txt --- # llms.txt A single Markdown file at `/llms.txt` that tells an AI assistant what a site is and where the good pages are. It exists because HTML is noisy — navigation, cookie banners, footers, scripts — and a model reading a page has to guess what matters. `llms.txt` removes the guessing. It is a convention, not a standard. No crawler is required to read it. Write one anyway: it costs ten minutes, it is read by a growing number of assistants and tools, and the act of writing it forces you to state plainly what the site is for. ## The format Strict Markdown, in this order. The structure is the contract — a parser looks for exactly this shape. ```markdown # Site or business name > One sentence saying what this is. Concrete. No marketing adjectives. Optional free prose. A short paragraph or two of context that does not fit a link — what the business does, who it serves, where it operates, what makes it different. Keep it factual. ## Section name - [Page title](https://example.com/page): what a reader gets from this page - [Another page](https://example.com/other): one clause, not a sentence ## Optional - [Lower-priority page](https://example.com/archive): things a model can skip if short on space ``` Rules that actually matter: 1. **One `# H1`**, the name. First line of the file. 2. **A `>` blockquote directly after it**, one sentence. This is the line most likely to be quoted back verbatim, so write it like a caption, not a slogan. 3. **`##` sections** group the links. Name them for what they are — `Services`, `Case studies`, `Docs`, `About` — not `Resources` or `More`. 4. **Every list item is a link followed by `:` and a description.** The description is the point. `[Pricing](/pricing): three plans, from €19/month, no setup fee` is useful. `[Pricing](/pricing): our pricing page` is noise. 5. **Absolute URLs.** A model may read the file with no knowledge of the origin. 6. **A section literally named `## Optional`** is the one piece of magic: anything under it is explicitly marked as skippable when context is tight. Use it. Do not use it for anything you actually want read. ## What goes in Only pages a person would be glad to land on. A good `llms.txt` for a small site is ten links. For a large one it is thirty, not three hundred. Include: the home page, what you sell or do, pricing, about, contact, the three or four best pieces of writing, documentation entry points, anything with real specifics in it. Leave out: tag and category archives, pagination, login and account pages, checkout, thank-you pages, anything `noindex`, anything thin, and anything duplicated across URLs. ## The one-page case A single landing page still gets an `llms.txt`, and it is mostly prose rather than links. The blockquote and the paragraph under it carry everything: ```markdown # Panadería Aurora > A wood-fired sourdough bakery in Malasaña, Madrid, open Tuesday to Sunday from 8am. Aurora bakes four breads daily — country sourdough, seeded rye, olive fougasse and a Saturday-only brioche — in a wood oven installed in 1974. Everything is sold from the counter at Calle del Pez 14; there is no delivery and no online ordering. Wholesale enquiries from restaurants are taken by phone. ## Pages - [Home](https://panaderiaaurora.es/): breads, hours, address, and how to order wholesale ## Optional - [Instagram](https://instagram.com/panaderiaaurora): daily bake announcements ``` That is a complete, correct file. Do not pad it. ## llms-full.txt The optional companion at `/llms-full.txt` holds the actual **content** — the full text of the important pages, concatenated as clean Markdown, so an assistant can read the substance without fetching anything. Write one when the site is documentation, a knowledge base, or anything where the value is in the text. Skip it for a one-page landing site: `llms.txt` already contains everything. Keep it plain Markdown: `# Page title`, then the page's prose. No navigation, no HTML, no scripts, no repeated header and footer. Strip everything a reader would skip. ## Where the files go Both live at the domain root, served as `text/plain` or `text/markdown`: | Framework | Location | |---|---| | Next.js (App Router) | `public/llms.txt` | | Astro, Vite, SvelteKit | `public/llms.txt` | | Hugo, Jekyll, Eleventy | `static/llms.txt` | | Plain static site | next to `index.html` | Verify after deploying: `https://yourdomain.com/llms.txt` must return the raw file, not an HTML 404 page. Then point `robots.txt` at it, so a crawler that does not know the convention still finds it: ``` User-agent: * Allow: / User-agent: GPTBot Allow: / User-agent: ClaudeBot Allow: / User-agent: PerplexityBot Allow: / User-agent: Google-Extended Allow: / Sitemap: https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml ``` `llms.txt` is not a `robots.txt` directive, so it has no line of its own there. Linking it from the home page `` is harmless and occasionally helps: ```html ``` ## Validating one Read it back and check: - [ ] Exactly one `#` heading, and it is the first line - [ ] A `>` blockquote immediately after it, one sentence, factual - [ ] Every `##` section has at least one item - [ ] Every list item is `- [text](absolute-url): description` - [ ] No relative URLs - [ ] No link to a page that 404s, redirects, or is `noindex` - [ ] Every description says something specific — no "our services page" - [ ] Under about 100 links; if longer, most of them belong under `## Optional` or nowhere - [ ] Nothing in it is untrue. A model will repeat this verbatim The last one is the important one. `llms.txt` is the most quotable file on a site — everything in it is written in a model's preferred format, pre-chewed and unambiguous. An invented claim here does not get buried the way it would in a paragraph of HTML. It gets repeated. ## Writing the blockquote It is one sentence and it does most of the work. Three failure modes: | Bad | Why | Better | |---|---|---| | "Innovative solutions for modern businesses." | Says nothing. Fits any company. | "Payroll software for Spanish companies with 5–50 employees." | | "The best bakery in Madrid." | Unverifiable claim, reads as marketing, gets discounted. | "A wood-fired sourdough bakery in Malasaña, Madrid." | | "We are a full-service creative agency offering branding, web design, motion graphics, packaging and strategy for clients across sectors." | Too long, no shape, nothing to lift. | "A three-person branding studio in Lisbon working mostly with restaurants and hotels." | Name the thing, the who, and the where. Numbers and place names survive summarisation; adjectives do not.