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llms.txt: an hour of work, honestly assessed

llms.txt is a proposed standard: a markdown file at your domain root that gives AI systems a curated, plain-language map of your most important pages. It is not a ratified standard, adoption by AI companies is uneven, and nobody should promise you rankings from it. We publish one anyway, because it costs an hour, carries zero risk, and the sites that get cited tend to be the easiest ones to read.

What it is

robots.txt tells crawlers what they may not read. llms.txt does the opposite: it tells language models what is most worth reading, in the format they parse best, plain markdown. Site name, one-paragraph description, then curated links with a line of context each.

The honest status

It is a community proposal, not an IETF standard. Some AI crawlers read it, some ignore it, and the companies behind the big engines have made no binding commitments. Anyone selling llms.txt as a magic ranking lever is selling you weather. The case for it is asymmetric instead: near-zero cost, no downside, and it doubles as an exercise that forces you to state, in one page, what your site is actually about. Most companies fail that exercise on the first try, which is itself worth knowing.

How to write one

Start with an H1 of your site name and a blockquote describing what you do in one paragraph a stranger would understand.
Group your most important pages under H2 sections, each link with a single line of context.
Include prices and facts you want quoted correctly. Engines repeat what they can parse.
Keep it current. A stale llms.txt teaches engines stale facts about you.

A working example

# Kadima

> Fixed-price SEO and AEO tasks, bought online like software.
> Senior team, adversarial QA on every deliverable, prices public.

## Tasks
- [Technical SEO Audit](https://heykadima.com/tasks/technical-seo-audit.html): $1,050, 5 business days
- [AEO Visibility Audit](https://heykadima.com/tasks/aeo-visibility-audit.html): $975, how AI engines see you

The real thing is live at heykadima.com/llms.txt. Copy the structure, not the prices.

Where it fits

llms.txt is one small piece of AEO. The heavier levers are entity clarity, quotable page structure, crawler access and schema, which is the work our AEO Optimization task ships, llms.txt included.

Want the whole AEO layer done properly?

AEO Optimization ships entity fixes, schema, content restructuring, crawler access and your llms.txt, in 7 business days.

AEO Optimization, $1,225