AI discovery
Does llms.txt help AI visibility?
There is no good evidence that llms.txt improves visibility in AI answers.
It is a 2024 proposal for a file that gives language models a summary of a site. Google says no special AI files are needed for its AI features, and an Ahrefs analysis summarised by Papercrane found 97% of published llms.txt files received no requests in May 2026. It is cheap to add, so add one if you like, but do not expect results from it.
What llms.txt is
llms.txt is a proposal published in September 2024 by Jeremy Howard. It suggests placing a markdown file at /llms.txt that gives language models brief background on a site and links to the most useful pages, because ordinary HTML is built for people, not for models. It is a proposal, not a standard adopted by the major AI companies.
What the evidence says
- Google. Its guidance on AI Overviews and AI Mode says you do not need to create new machine-readable files, AI text files or markup to appear in those features.
- Crawl data. Papercrane summarises an Ahrefs study of 137,210 domains: 97% of published llms.txt files received zero requests in May 2026. Of the requests that did arrive, SEO audit tools made far more than AI assistants did.
- AI company documentation. OpenAI and Perplexity document their crawlers and how to allow them in robots.txt. Neither presents llms.txt as a ranking or citation factor.
Why it is still recommended
Some vendors include llms.txt in AEO checklists because it is easy to deliver and easy to show a client. That does not make it useful. If a service offers llms.txt as a main deliverable, ask what result it expects and how it will measure it.
Should you add one?
It costs little: a short file listing your key pages with one-line descriptions. Reasons to add one:
- It may help some agent tools that read it
- Writing it forces you to decide which pages matter
- It does no harm
Reasons not to prioritise it:
- No evidence of an effect on citations or mentions
- The same effort spent on one clear answer page would likely do more
This site has an llms.txt for convenience. It is labelled as experimental.
What to do instead
The things with better support are the unglamorous ones: allow OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Googlebot; publish pages that answer specific buyer questions; keep company descriptions consistent; and earn accurate third-party mentions. See what AEO means for B2B SaaS.
Sources
- The /llms.txt file, llmstxt.org, 2024-09-03.
- AI features and your website, Google Search Central, 2025-12-10.
- GEO and AEO: what the evidence supports, Papercrane. Summarises Ahrefs llms.txt data and other studies. Secondary source.
- Overview of OpenAI crawlers, OpenAI.
- Perplexity crawlers, Perplexity.