llms.txt is a convention proposed in September 2024 by Jeremy Howard. The file sits at the root of a site and uses simple Markdown: a title, a short summary and lists of links to key pages, each with a one-line description. The idea is to hand a model a clean map of your content so it does not have to work it out from full HTML.
It is not an official web standard, and it is not a permissions file like robots.txt. It does not allow or block anything. Support varies by tool: some coding assistants and AI tools read it, while Google has said that special files like this are not needed to appear in its AI search features. So it is cheap to publish and worth considering for documentation-heavy sites, but do not expect it to change your search ranking or guarantee an AI citation.
If you publish one, keep it accurate and in step with your real pages.
Related: AI-Ready Website, AI Crawler, XML Sitemap.