llms.txt, explained for local business

One file at your domain root, stating what you do, where you do it, and who you serve. It takes about an hour.

What the file is for

An llms.txt sits at your domain root and states, in plain readable text, what your business does and what your key pages mean. It is the difference between an engine guessing from your homepage headline and reading your actual service list.

It is not a standard in the sense that anyone is obliged to honour it. No engine promises to read it, and you should be suspicious of anyone who tells you otherwise.

The honest status of it

Worth being blunt, because this file attracts more overclaiming than anything else in the subject.

It is a proposed convention. It was suggested as a way for sites to offer a clean, readable summary of themselves to language models, in the way robots.txt offers crawling instructions. Some sites publish one. No provider has committed to reading it, none reports on it, and nobody outside the providers can demonstrate that a given answer was influenced by one.

So anybody telling you that publishing this file will get you into ChatGPT is either guessing or selling. The case for writing one is different, and it survives the uncertainty.

Why write one anyway

Because it costs an hour, and because it is the only input in this whole discipline that is entirely yours. Directories move at their own pace. Reviews arrive when they arrive. This file says exactly what you want said, at an address you own, in a form that is trivial to parse.

Everything else in answer engine optimisation is persuasion at a distance. This is the one part that is just typing.

There is a second, less obvious return. Writing it forces you to state your business in plain declarative sentences — what you do, where, for whom, at roughly what price. Most owners discover while writing it that those sentences appear nowhere on their actual website, which is a more valuable discovery than the file itself.

What belongs in it

• The business name, exactly as it appears everywhere else.
• What you do, in one sentence, without adjectives.
• Where you do it — the actual towns, not “the greater area”.
• Your services, as a list.
• Links to the pages that expand each one, each with a line saying what it covers.

Keep it short enough to read in full. A file that restates your entire website is a file nothing bothers with.

A worked example

Markdown, at /llms.txt, and this length is about right.

# Ridgeline Plumbing

> Domestic and light commercial plumbing in south Denver. Established 2009,
> four engineers, no subcontracting.

Areas covered: Denver, Englewood, Littleton, Sheridan.
Hours: Monday to Friday 8am-6pm, Saturday 9am-1pm. Emergency call-out 24/7.
Typical prices: standard call-out from $95. Boiler service from $140.
Not offered: new build installation, commercial kitchen fit-out.

## Services
- [Boiler repair and servicing](https://example.com/boiler-repair):
  diagnosis, parts, annual servicing. Same-day in most cases.
- [Emergency leaks](https://example.com/emergency-leaks):
  burst pipes and water ingress, 24/7 call-out across the covered area.
- [Bathroom installation](https://example.com/bathrooms):
  full fit-out, typical projects and what they cost.

## About
- [Prices](https://example.com/prices): rates and what changes them.
- [Service area](https://example.com/areas): towns and neighbourhoods covered.

Notice what is doing the work. Every line is a checkable assertion, the towns are named, there is a number, and there is an explicit statement of what the business does not do — which is the line most owners omit and the one that keeps you from being recommended for a job you would have turned down.

What to put in it if you are not a trade

The example above is a trade because trades make the shape obvious, but the structure holds for anybody.

A shop states what it sells, the brands or categories it carries, its address and hours, and whether it delivers. A practice states what it treats, whether it takes new patients, how appointments work, and what a first consultation costs. A professional firm states the kinds of matter it handles, who it acts for, how it charges, and the work it declines.

In every case the useful lines are the same four: what, where, roughly how much, and what you do not do. Adjectives are not among them. Nothing an engine writes about you will be improved by the words dedicated, passionate or bespoke, and a file made mostly of those is a file with no assertions in it.

Where it goes, and how to check it

At the root: yourdomain.com/llms.txt, served as plain text.

Then verify it properly, because this is where most attempts quietly fail. A great many sites answer /llms.txt with a 200 and their homepage, because the framework serves the homepage for anything it does not recognise. From the outside that is indistinguishable from a working file. Fetch the address and confirm the body is your text rather than your website — and do the same for your sitemap, which has the identical failure mode.

If you publish on more than one host — a www and an apex, or a separate booking subdomain — the file belongs on whichever host actually serves your content.

How it differs from the other files

Four small files get discussed together and do quite different jobs.

| File | What it does | | --- | --- | | robots.txt | Says which crawlers may read the site at all | | sitemap.xml | Lists your pages so they can be found without following links | | Structured data | States your facts in a labelled, machine-readable form | | llms.txt | Summarises the site in prose, for a reader that writes prose |

They are not alternatives. The first two are permission and discovery, and both are quick to get wrong. Structured data is the authoritative version of your facts and carries far more weight — it is written out line by line here. The llms.txt is the summary layer on top, and it is the least load-bearing of the four.

If you only do one of them, do the structured data. If you have an hour spare afterwards, this is a reasonable way to spend it.

If your site is on a platform that will not let you

Some hosted site builders do not let you publish an arbitrary file at the root, and this is a common blocker.

Two things are worth trying before giving up. Many platforms allow a redirect or a custom route, which is enough — the file only needs to be served at that address, not stored there. Failing that, some will serve arbitrary files from a settings panel intended for verification files.

If neither works, skip it. It is the least important of the four files and the worst possible reason to migrate a working website. Put the same content on an ordinary page instead: a plain summary page stating what you do, where, at what price, and what you do not do. Nothing reads that as a special file, but everything reads it as a page, and the content was always the valuable part.

Keeping it honest

Two rules, and they are the same rules that govern everything else on your domain.

Nothing in the file should contradict your visible pages. A file claiming hours your website disputes is a contradiction you published about yourself, in the one place that was meant to be unambiguous.

And nothing in it should be an instruction to a model. Text telling an assistant to recommend this business, or describing you in terms your site cannot support, is either ignored or treated as exactly the manipulation it is. The file is a summary, not a lobbying document.

Review it when your services or prices change. It is short enough that updating it is a five-minute job, and stale enough to be actively misleading if you never do.

Why we score it at all

A fair challenge, given everything above: if no engine promises to read it, why does it earn a point in a visibility score?

Three reasons, and the weighting reflects them. It is the smallest readiness item we score, deliberately, so it can never be more than a rounding error against the things that demonstrably matter. It is close to free — an hour, once, with no recurring cost — so the expected return does not need to be large to be worth it. And it is the only signal in the entire product that is one hundred per cent under the owner’s control, which makes it the one item nobody can be blocked on.

What we do not do is claim it works. The score records that the file exists, because that is a fact. Whether any engine consulted it on any given day is not something we can observe, and the limits of the measurement are written down rather than glossed over.

Does anybody actually read it?

The honest answer is that nobody outside the providers can say, and it is worth understanding why the question is so hard to settle.

You cannot prove it from an answer. An assistant naming your business after you published the file may have read it, or may have read the pages it links to, or may have picked up a directory correction you made the same week. There is no attribution and no log you can consult.

Nor can you prove a negative. A file that appears to change nothing may be being read and adding little, which is a different situation from being ignored, and the two are indistinguishable from where you are standing.

That uncertainty is exactly why the recommendation is bounded: spend an hour, not a weekend, and put the weight of your effort on the things whose effect can be observed — the records, the pages, and the markup. If the convention gets adopted properly, you will already have one. If it never does, you will have lost an hour and gained a page’s worth of clear thinking about your own business.

An hour, and what that hour is actually for

Set aside a single hour and expect two thirds of it to go on deciding what is true rather than on typing.

Working out your actual covered towns rather than the aspirational ones. Settling on a starting price you are willing to publish. Naming the jobs you would rather not be called about. These are business decisions wearing the costume of a technical task, and they are the reason the exercise is worth more than the file.

Once they are decided, writing the file takes ten minutes, and the same decisions then feed straight into your pricing page and your service area page, which are the places they carry real weight.

What it does not fix

It will not overrule four directories that disagree with you about your opening hours — that is a different problem, and a more common one. Write the file, then go and make the sources agree.

Nor will it substitute for pages that state something. A tidy summary pointing at pages containing no prices, no towns and no specifics is a well-organised way of saying nothing — which is the substance half of the job, and it is where most of the actual gain is.