If you've seen 'llms.txt' mentioned alongside robots.txt and sitemap.xml and wondered whether you need one, here's the honest, data-backed answer rather than the hype.
What llms.txt actually is
llms.txt is a plain-text file placed at a website's root (yoursite.com/llms.txt), proposed in 2024 by developer Jeremy Howard. It gives AI models a short, structured summary of what a site is for, its key pages and its content priorities, written in Markdown so an AI tool can read it quickly instead of crawling the whole site.
Adoption is rising fast, but most files go unread
- Originality.ai counted 4,088 sites publishing an llms.txt file in June 2025, and 36,120 by May 2026, an 8.8x increase
- Even so, Ahrefs found that 97% of llms.txt files received zero requests from AI crawlers in May 2026, based on server-log data from 137,000 domains
- Of the requests that did happen, AI retrieval bots made up only about 1.1%; most traffic to these files came from SEO audit tools and general web crawlers, not AI assistants reading your site
Does it help SEO or AI search ranking?
Google has said llms.txt has no positive or negative effect on Search rankings. It isn't an AI-search equivalent of a sitemap that guarantees visibility. Where it genuinely helps is narrower: sites with substantial documentation, an API, or structured product data that an AI agent might need to navigate programmatically. For most small and mid-size business sites, that's not the situation.
We publish one, for what it's worth
Sigma Nepal's own site generates an llms.txt automatically as part of our build, listing our main pages and what they cover. It costs nothing extra to maintain once it's set up, so we keep it even though the evidence above says not to expect much from it on its own. We just don't oversell it to clients as an AI-SEO silver bullet, because the data doesn't support that.
Should you add one?
- Worth doing: if it's cheap to generate (a short, honest summary of your site) and you're already investing in AEO/GEO content anyway
- Not worth obsessing over: spending real budget or developer time on llms.txt instead of on content AI tools can actually cite and quote
- Keep robots.txt and your sitemap as the priority; those are what crawlers and search engines actually rely on today
