- Will this improve my search ranking?
- No, and we are not going to imply otherwise. There is no evidence llms.txt affects search ranking, and no engine has confirmed it reads one. Anybody selling it as a ranking factor is guessing.
- So why bother at all?
- Because it costs about an hour and it is the only place you write your own summary instead of having one inferred from your marketing copy. If the convention is adopted, you are ready. If it is not, you have spent an hour and lost nothing. That is the honest case, and it is the whole of it.
- Is this the same as robots.txt?
- No. robots.txt controls which crawlers may access what, and it is enforced. llms.txt describes your business in plain language and enforces nothing. If you want to control whether assistants can read your site at all, that is robots.txt.
- How long should it be?
- Short. A summary, the services, the prices, a handful of key links and a contact. If it grows past a page you have written a brochure, and a stale brochure is worse than no file.