We have a free llms.txt generator, and we still wrote this. That should tell you we are not here to hype the file. We are here to tell you what it does, what it does not, and why it is still worth ten minutes.
Quick recap, since we covered the basics elsewhere. An llms.txt is a plain-text file at your site root that names your site, summarizes what you do, and links the pages you most want models to read. Think of it as a polite table of contents aimed at AI. The idea is reasonable. The question is whether anything actually reads it.
What the evidence says
Not much reads it, and the platforms have been blunt about ranking. The honest state of play in 2026:
- ✓Ahrefs studied 137,000 sites and found roughly 97% of llms.txt files are never fetched by an AI crawler, on the order of one fetch in a thousand.
- ✓Google has stated plainly that llms.txt has no effect on search rankings and described it as speculative for now.
- ✓No major engine, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or Perplexity, has confirmed it uses the file to decide what to recommend.
- ✓Confusingly, tooling has started adding llms.txt checks anyway, which makes teams think it is a ranking factor when the platforms say it is not.
An emerging convention is not the same as a ranking signal. llms.txt is the former, and the marketing around it keeps pretending it is the latter.
So should you ship one?
Yes, with the right expectations. It takes about ten minutes, and the worst case is that nothing ever reads it. The upside is a clean, model-friendly summary of your site that is genuinely useful to have written down somewhere. If adoption grows, you are ready. If it does not, you have lost nothing. Just do not file it under things that will get me recommended, because today it is not that.
The tell for an overhyped AEO tactic is a confident promise with no platform behind it. llms.txt is the current example. Ship it as good hygiene, the same way you keep a tidy sitemap, and put your real effort where the evidence actually points.
What to do instead
If your goal is to actually get read and recommended, the levers that move are unglamorous and well established. Make sure AI crawlers are not blocked in your robots.txt. Make sure your real content ships in the raw HTML, not after JavaScript runs. Add clean schema so your entity is easy to parse. Then earn the third-party mentions and reviews that these models weigh far more heavily than any file you place on your own root.
Our free tools cover the first three in a couple of minutes each, including the llms.txt generator if you do want the tidy version. Just spend the bulk of your time on the parts with evidence behind them.