Introduction to llms.txt and AEO

The llms.txt file is a plain text file that you place at the root of your website — similar to robots.txt — to provide guidance to large language models about how to interpret and use your site's content. It's an emerging standard designed to help AI systems better understand and represent your site.

The idea behind llms.txt is straightforward: as AI tools increasingly crawl and summarize web content, having a structured, human-readable file that describes your site, its purpose, and its key content can help those systems produce more accurate representations of what your site is actually about.

A basic llms.txt file typically includes a brief description of your site, links to your most important pages or resources, and optionally some guidance on how you'd like your content to be used or attributed by AI systems.

This isn't a formal standard controlled by any single organization — it's a community-driven convention that's gaining adoption. But for sites that care about how they're represented in AI-generated responses, it's a low-effort signal worth adding.

In Webflow, you can create an llms.txt file by uploading it as an asset or by creating a page with the appropriate path. The simplest approach is to create a plain text file and host it at yourdomain.com/llms.txt.

It's worth noting that llms.txt is not a guarantee that AI systems will follow its guidance — it's a signal, not a control mechanism. But as AEO practices evolve, being explicit about your content and its context is generally a good practice.