llms.txt
llms.txt is a plain-text file placed at the root of a website that gives AI systems a clean, curated summary of what the site is about and which pages matter most, the way robots.txt speaks to search crawlers.
What it means
As AI systems increasingly read websites to answer questions, site owners needed a way to hand those systems a clear, machine-friendly map instead of making them guess from cluttered HTML. llms.txt is an emerging convention that does exactly that: a Markdown file at yoursite.com/llms.txt summarizing the site and pointing to its key content.
It is not a magic ranking trick. It is a courtesy and a clarity tool: it reduces the chance an AI misreads your site, and it makes your most important pages easy for a model to find and quote correctly.
Adoption is early and support varies by AI system, but the cost of adding one is trivial and the downside is essentially zero. It's become a sensible default for any business that wants to be represented accurately in AI answers.
Why it matters for owner-operated businesses
A clean llms.txt lowers the odds that an assistant describes your business with outdated or wrong information, and raises the odds it surfaces the pages you actually want quoted.
It's a small, concrete, do-it-this-week move in a space where most of the work is slower. Main Street IQ maintains one for this very site.