llms.txt: what it is, and whether your shop needs one
llms.txt is a new file some stores are adding for AI tools. Here is the plain version: what it does, how settled it really is, and what to put in yours.
You have probably met llms.txt in a newsletter, a forum thread, or an agency email, described with a lot of urgency and very little detail. Somebody may have quoted you a price to add one.
Here is the plain version, including the parts that tend to get left out.
What the file actually is
llms.txt is a small text file that sits at yourstore.com/llms.txt, in the same public spot as robots.txt, which is the older file that tells automated visitors which parts of your site they may read. This one has a different job. Rather than controlling access, it hands over a short, hand-picked map of your most useful pages.
The proposed shape is simple. A heading is the only required part. The proposal also recommends a short summary and lists of useful links, each with a few words explaining what it is. Categories, shipping and returns, contact, about. That is the useful shape for a store.
Why anyone proposed it
Your homepage is built for a person. Navigation menus, promotional banners, images, a carousel, a cookie notice, and somewhere in there the actual answer to what this shop sells.
A person takes about three seconds to sort all that out. A program has to work through the whole thing to reach the same conclusion, and it may reach a worse one. llms.txt skips the sorting by stating the essentials directly, in the order they are useful, with none of the layout in the way.
How settled this actually is
Not very, and that matters when you are deciding what to spend on it.
The idea was published on 3 September 2024 by Jeremy Howard of the AI lab Answer.AI, and the public proposal describes itself as a proposal. Compare that with robots.txt, which dates to 1994 and is now an internet standard for automated visitors that choose to follow it. One has a published standard and broad vendor support. The other is a newer suggestion that some site owners and tools have picked up.
The honest position is this. Google Search says plainly that it does not use llms.txt, including for its AI search features. Other major assistant makers publish controls for their automated visitors, but do not promise in those documents to read llms.txt when answering a shopper's question. Shopify now creates llms.txt automatically for every store, while calling a different file, agents.md, its main source for this information. That is real adoption, but it is not evidence of a known effect on answers. Anyone presenting the file as a lever with a known effect is going beyond what is currently published.
What it does not do
llms.txt does not make your product details readable. That job belongs to the price, stock status, and product code being written into your product pages in a form software can read, and a map cannot substitute for facts that are not there.
It also does not get anyone through the door. That is settled by your robots.txt file. Adding an llms.txt file to a store that turns AI visitors away, or that hides its prices behind a script, achieves very little, because a map is only useful to a visitor who is both allowed in and able to read what it finds at the other end.
So treat it as an optional map that sits alongside the fundamentals. If you have time to fix one thing this month, this is rarely the one that matters most. If the fundamentals are already sound, it is a sensible next small step.
Check your own store
SchemaCart's free scan checks whether your store has an llms.txt file at all, and whether what is there has the basic shape, meaning a real heading followed by a list of links rather than an empty file or a page of your site returned by mistake. It is one of the five AI checks and carries thirteen of the scan's hundred points. It takes about a minute and needs only your store's web address.
One thing the scan does not do is follow the links inside the file to see whether they still work, so that part stays a manual review when you update your categories.
What to put in yours
Keep it short and factual. Start with a heading and one or two sentences describing what you sell, in the same words you would use explaining your business to somebody who had never heard of it.
Then a list of links to the pages that genuinely matter. Your main categories, a page covering shipping and returns, and a contact or about page will cover most stores. Group them under plain headings such as categories, policies, and contact if that makes the file easier to scan.
Two things to avoid. Do not paste your entire navigation menu into it, because a complete site map in a different format defeats the point of a hand-picked one. And leave the marketing voice out. This file is read by a program summarising your shop for somebody else's question, not by a shopper you are trying to win over, so a plain line describing what you sell does more work than a persuasive one.
If you are stuck on which pages to include, use this test: what would you tell a new member of staff on their first morning if they asked what the shop sells and which pages matter. That instinct, kept short and honest, produces a better file than trying to guess what an AI system wants to see.
There is no required length. Most useful examples run to a handful of sentences and somewhere between five and fifteen links, short enough to read in well under a minute. A large or unusual catalogue might justify more, but the goal stays the same, which is that a program comes away with an accurate picture of where to look next.
Keep it true
A map that points at pages you deleted is worse than no map, because it spends a visitor's attention on dead ends and it says something inaccurate about your shop.
Treat it like a sitemap. When your main categories change, or a page you linked disappears, update the file. Twice a year is enough for most stores, and it takes a couple of minutes.
Deciding whether to add one
If your fundamentals are in order, meaning AI visitors are allowed in and your product details are readable, adding an llms.txt file is a low-cost next step. It is well under an hour of work for a developer, and a comfortable store owner can write one by hand.
If you have not confirmed the fundamentals, start there instead. A careful map of a store that cannot be read properly is effort spent in the wrong place.
Either way, do not let anyone sell you llms.txt as the thing that changes how assistants treat your shop. It is a small, honest signal with no promised effect of its own, and the unglamorous work underneath it still does most of the lifting.
Curious whether your store already has one, and what shape it is in? Run the free scan at SchemaCart to find out.