The llms.txt file: what we actually put in it

We add an llms.txt file to every site we ship now. Clients ask what it is and whether it does anything. Here is the honest answer, and the exact contents of ours.

What llms.txt actually is

It is a plain text file at the root of your domain, at yoursite.com/llms.txt. The idea, proposed in 2024, is to hand language models a clean, structured summary of who you are and what matters on your site. Think of it as a brief written for a machine that may one day answer a question about you.

One honest caveat up front: llms.txt is an emerging convention, not an official standard, and no AI engine promises to read it. We add it anyway, because the cost is close to zero and the potential upside compounds over time. This is the same logic as our wider work on GEO.

What we put in it

The order matters. Models weigh the top of the file most.

• A one-line definition first. A single sentence that starts with your name: "X is a ...". This is the line most likely to be extracted verbatim.
• Overview. Founded, founder, location, contact, languages, areas served.
• Services, in plain words.
• Expertise, what you genuinely do well, not a wish list.
• Sectors, who you serve.
• Pricing anchors. Optional, but starting figures help a model answer "is this in my budget".
• Named clients. Real names build entity density. Models cross-reference the people and brands around you.
• Collaborators, with links.
• Founder bio.
• Site map, the handful of pages that matter.
• A list of your articles. Keep it current. More on that below.
• Contact.
• An FAQ in plain question and answer form. This is the format models extract most cleanly.

What we leave out

Keyword stuffing, marketing superlatives, and anything that changes every week. A file full of empty adjectives is noise. A file that goes stale is worse than no file.

Keep it current

A lesson from our own site: we published five journal articles and left them out of our llms.txt for weeks. The file still described a site that no longer existed. If you publish regularly, add a single rule: every time a new page goes live, update llms.txt the same day.

Where to put the file, by platform

Serving the file at the root is the part that trips people up, and it depends entirely on your platform.

Webflow. Webflow lets you upload the file natively in the site settings. [Confirmer le chemin exact avant publication.] You write the file, upload it, publish, and it is served at the root.

Shopify. More involved, and it changed recently. Since May 2026, every Shopify store ships with a default file: Shopify auto-generates an agents.md, and the /llms.txt and /llms-full.txt paths point to that same content by default. The catch is that the default describes your store in Shopify's words, not in the terms that make you worth recommending. To control it, add a template under Online Store > Themes > Edit code:

• templates/llms.txt.liquid controls /llms.txt only.
• templates/llms-full.txt.liquid controls /llms-full.txt only.
• templates/agents.md.liquid controls /agents.md, and serves as the fallback for the other two.

If no template exists for a path, Shopify falls back to your agents.md template, then to its own generated default. So on Shopify you do not upload a file at the root, which the platform does not allow. You override the template for the path you care about. Two caveats. It is a theme-level change, so you need access to edit the theme code; on a locked or heavily app-managed theme, hand it to your developer. And check the result after publishing by opening yourstore.com/llms.txt in a browser, to confirm it serves clean text and not a wrapped HTML page.

The older workarounds you will still find in blog posts, uploading to Content > Files and 301-redirecting /llms.txt to the CDN URL, or proxying through Cloudflare, are mostly unnecessary now that Shopify supports the templates natively.

WordPress. Simplest of the three. A plain file dropped in the site root, or a small plugin, serves it directly.

What not to expect

An llms.txt file will not put you inside ChatGPT overnight. It is one signal among many, and probably not the strongest. What moves the needle more is consistency across the open web: your name, stated the same way, on your site, on LinkedIn, in directories, in your clients' credits. The file helps a model that has already found you describe you correctly. It does not, on its own, make you findable.

If you want a second pair of eyes on your own llms.txt, send the link to bonjour@dellamattia.com.

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