What llms.txt is, and how we added one to our site
A plain-English look at llms.txt, the proposed markdown file that gives AI assistants a short map of your site, what it can and can't promise, and how we wrote and tested our own.
Websites have had little notes for robots for decades. robots.txt tells crawlers where they may go, and sitemap.xml lists every page. llms.txt is a newer note with a different reader in mind: the AI assistant or coding agent that lands on your site mid-conversation and needs to figure out what you actually do. Jeremy Howard published the proposal on llmstxt.org in September 2024 and revised it as v2 in August 2026. The pitch is simple. Web pages are built for people, wrapped in menus, scripts and cookie banners, and an agent has a limited context window. So you hand it one short markdown file at /llms.txt that says who you are and where the good stuff lives.
The format is refreshingly small. The file starts with an H1 holding the name of the site or project, and that heading is the only required part. Next comes a blockquote with a one or two line summary, then any extra notes as plain paragraphs or lists. After that, H2 sections each hold a list of markdown links, with an optional colon and a short note after each link. A section called Optional is the conventional place for links an agent can skip when it is short on room. Because it is plain markdown, people can read it and simple scripts can parse it. Here is a made-up example for a tiny shop:
# Juniper Paper Co.
> Juniper Paper Co. makes recycled notebooks and ships them from a small workshop.
All prices are in USD. We do not take custom orders.
## Products
- [Notebooks](https://example.com/notebooks.md): Sizes, paper weights and prices
- [Shipping](https://example.com/shipping.md): Where we ship and how long it takes
## Optional
- [Our story](https://example.com/about.md)For a small studio the case is modest. When someone asks an assistant what we sell, we would rather it read a tidy summary we wrote than guess from a page full of buttons. It costs one text file. Now the honest part. llms.txt is a proposed convention, not a web standard, and no one is obliged to read it. The proposal says coding agents use these files and that thousands of sites publish one, but we could not find a public statement from a major AI provider saying their chat assistant looks for it on ordinary websites. So we treat it as cheap, polite housekeeping. We have no traffic or ranking numbers to show from it, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
Our own llms.txt lives in the public folder of our Next.js site, so it ships at the root with no code at all. It opens with the studio name and the same one-line description as our home page, then lists products, services and the tech blog. We recently gave the Night Sky UI Kit its own nested entries for Star Cursor, Night Sky and Aurora Glow, each linking to its component page with a short, factual note and the price. Files like this rot quietly when URLs change, so a small test in test/seo.spec.ts reads the file and checks that the product pages, including all three component links, are still in it. If one goes missing, the build tells us before a robot does.
# lhcreative.studio
## Products
- [Night Sky UI Kit](https://apps.lhcreative.studio/catalog/night-sky-ui-kit): Star cursor, starfield, and aurora glow React components. $19 for the full kit or $9 per component.
- [Star Cursor](https://apps.lhcreative.studio/catalog/night-sky-ui-kit/star-cursor): A shooting star cursor for React. ...
- [Night Sky](https://apps.lhcreative.studio/catalog/night-sky-ui-kit/night-sky): A night sky background effect for React. ...
- [Aurora Glow](https://apps.lhcreative.studio/catalog/night-sky-ui-kit/aurora-glow): An aurora glow background effect for React. ...More articles
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