For a typical small business website, no. It won’t hurt, it takes twenty minutes, and at the time of writing (late 2026) almost nothing reads it. If an SEO provider is charging you to add one as part of an “AI optimisation” package, ask what else is in the package.
The longer answer is worth knowing, because llms.txt keeps coming up in sales pitches and you should be able to judge it yourself.
What llms.txt is
It’s a proposal, published at llmstxt.org in 2024, for a plain text file that sits at the root of your site (yoursite.com.au/llms.txt) and gives AI tools a tidy summary of what’s on it. The idea is that a language model shouldn’t have to wade through menus, cookie banners and page builders to work out what your business does. It reads one short Markdown file instead.
A small business version might look like this:
# Example Plumbing
> Licensed plumber servicing Ballina, Lennox Head and Alstonville, NSW.
> Emergency callouts, hot water systems, blocked drains and bathroom renovations.
## Services
- [Hot water systems](https://example.com.au/hot-water/): Repairs and replacements, gas, electric and heat pump
- [Blocked drains](https://example.com.au/blocked-drains/): CCTV inspection and jet blasting
- [Emergency plumbing](https://example.com.au/emergency/): 7 days, Ballina Shire
## About
- [About us](https://example.com.au/about/): Family business, NSW licence number listed
- [Contact](https://example.com.au/contact/): Phone, email and service area
It’s a heading, a short summary, then sections of links with one-line descriptions. Nothing technical, which is part of its appeal.
Don’t confuse it with robots.txt. Robots.txt tells crawlers what they’re allowed to fetch, and every major crawler checks it. llms.txt is a suggestion about what’s worth reading, and it’s optional for everyone, including the AI companies. If you’re trying to control AI access, you want our guide to blocking AI crawlers with robots.txt instead.
Who reads it
This is where the hype runs into data.
Adoption has grown quickly. Originality.ai, which tracks the files across millions of websites, counted around 4,000 sites with an llms.txt in June 2025 and about 36,000 by May 2026, according to a summary of its research on PPC Land.
But publishing a file and having it read are different things. The same report cites Ahrefs server-log research which found that 97% of llms.txt files received no requests at all in May 2026. Of the requests that did arrive, AI retrieval bots made up about 1.1%. SEO audit tools were the biggest visitors. So the main audience for llms.txt files right now is other software checking whether you’ve got an llms.txt file.
None of the major AI companies has formally committed to using it in how their search or chat products find and rank websites. Some publish llms.txt files on their own documentation sites, which is a different thing: that’s about helping developers’ coding tools read docs, not about choosing which plumber to recommend.
What Google says
Google has been unusually direct. Its official guidance on AI features in Search says you don’t need to create new machine-readable files, AI text files or Markdown to appear in Google Search, and that creating them “will neither harm nor help your site’s visibility or rankings in Google Search.”
There’s one small wrinkle. In May 2026, Chrome’s Lighthouse tool added an experimental “agentic browsing” audit that checks for an llms.txt file. That’s aimed at AI agents that browse websites on a user’s behalf, not at search rankings, and a missing file is marked “not applicable” rather than failed. If someone shows you a Lighthouse report and says it proves you need one, that’s not what it shows.
When it might be worth doing
There are a few situations where we’d add one without much argument:
- Documentation-heavy sites. Software products, online courses or businesses with large help sections, where developers or agents might genuinely want a clean index.
- Sites where agents may act. If you expect AI agents to book, buy or compare on a customer’s behalf, a clear map of key pages is a sensible low-cost bet on where things are heading.
- When it’s free. Some SEO plugins can now generate one automatically. If it’s a checkbox and the output is accurate, there’s no reason not to tick it.
For a five-page trade site or a local practice, the file would mostly repeat your menu. The pages it points to are what matter, and if those are clear, well structured and consistent with your Google listing, AI tools will find what they need without a summary.
Where your time is better spent
If you’ve got an hour for AI visibility this month, these will do more than llms.txt:
- Fill in every field of your Google Business Profile, especially services.
- Make sure each service has its own page with a plain description of what you do and where.
- Fix old phone numbers and addresses on directories and partner sites. Our article on how AI tools judge trust explains why consistency matters so much.
- Check that your robots.txt isn’t accidentally blocking the crawlers you want.
Our position
We don’t add llms.txt to client sites by default. If a client asks, we’ll generate one from their real page structure and keep it accurate, because a stale llms.txt pointing at deleted pages is worse than none. We’ll revisit that position if any of the major AI search tools start using it in a way we can measure.
If you’re weighing up an “AI search” quote that leans on llms.txt and not much else, we’re happy to give you a second opinion. You can also see what’s included in our web design packages and how an AI search audit checks the things that do make a difference.