Why It Exists
More people ask an AI assistant for a recommendation than most business owners realize: "who does roof soft washing near Christiansburg," typed into ChatGPT or asked of Google's AI answer instead of a search box. Those systems read websites the way crawlers always have, and a website is a messy thing to read: navigation, cookie notices, sliders, footers, and somewhere in the middle, the facts.
llms.txt, proposed in 2024 by Jeremy Howard of Answer.AI, is a convention for handing those systems the facts directly. One text file, written in plain Markdown, at the root of the site. What the business is, where it serves, how to contact it, what it offers, and links to the pages worth reading.
What It Looks Like
# Gable Exterior Cleaning > Soft washing and pressure washing for homes and businesses > across the New River Valley of Virginia. Service-area > business, no storefront. Free quotes without a site visit. ## Contact - Phone: (540) 555-0164 (call or text) - Serving: Blacksburg, Christiansburg, Radford, Pulaski ## Services - House Washing - Roof Soft Washing - Driveway and Concrete Cleaning ## Important Pages - [Services](https://gableexterior.example/services) - [Get a Quote](https://gableexterior.example/contact)
The Honest Part
Whether it moves the needle is not settled. It is a young convention, not a formal standard, and the AI companies have not said how much weight they give it. Some of them read it. Nobody outside those companies knows what they do with it next.
BizPinPro puts one on every site anyway, for two reasons. The cost is zero: it is generated from the same information that drives the rest of the site, so a changed phone number or a new service shows up in it automatically and it can never drift out of date. And the server logs every time an AI crawler reads it, so the owner can see for themselves whether it is being used, instead of taking anyone's word either way.
How To Check It
Add /llms.txt to the end of the site's address. A site that has one shows a plain text page. A site that does not shows a not-found page.
See it on a working build: the pressure washing page shows the llms.txt written for Gable Exterior Cleaning.
The Foundation Connection
llms.txt belongs with Schema in the Verified Identity layer of the Digital Foundation. Schema states the business facts for search engines in their vocabulary. llms.txt states the same facts for AI systems in theirs. Both come from the same source on a well built site, so there is one set of facts, written once, and every system that asks gets the same answer.
