llms.txt
llms.txt is a proposed plain-text file placed at a site root that points AI crawlers and language models to the pages and facts a site considers most important, written in Markdown so a model can read it without parsing the full HTML of every page.
The idea is simple: rather than make a model wade through navigation, scripts, and boilerplate, you hand it a curated map of your best content with short descriptions and links. It mirrors the spirit of robots.txt and sitemap.xml, but it is a community proposal, not a standard, and no major AI provider has confirmed it changes how their systems crawl, rank, or cite.
The honest read is that llms.txt is cheap to ship and has negligible measurable effect today. The large answer engines build their understanding from pages they already fetch and from corroboration across the wider web, not from a self-declared file that any site could fill with marketing claims. Treating it as a ranking lever is a misread; treating it as low-cost hygiene that may matter later is fair.
What actually drives AI citation is more mundane: clean, crawlable pages, clear and specific answers near the top of each one, and the same facts confirmed by independent sources a model already trusts. Getting existing reviews readable, corroborated, and cited by search and AI is the gap BetterReviews closes, and it does far more for visibility than any single text file at the root.