Here is the fastest way to get AI bots read LLMs.txt file
Make your website content super easy for AI bots to digest. That’s the most important part of getting AI bots read, crawl and index your website’s content, URL, and even cite it to everyone who searches either on chatgpt, gemini or any AI browser like Atlas or Comet.
Step 1: Put it in the right root folder: https://yoursite.com/llms.txt – not in a subfolder, not with a different name. H1 title, blockquote summary, then H2 sections linking to your best content. Keep it simple.
Step 2: Create .md versions of your important pages: This is the part everyone skips. Take your /docs/api.html page and create /docs/api.html.md with just the meat – no nav bars, no cookie banners, no “Subscribe to our newsletter!” garbage. AI models have tiny attention spans.
Step 3: Make sure robots.txt isn’t blocking it: Basic stuff, but worth checking. You can also try adding llm-discovery: https://yoursite.com/llms.txt to your robots.txt (not confirmed to work, but some people swear by it).
Step 4: Test it like you mean it: Hit the URL in your browser. Does it load? Is it clean markdown? Use validators like llms_txt2ctx to check formatting.
Reality-check: Most of this stuff is in beta mode at best. The llm-discovery directive? Pure speculation. Half the “standards” floating around? Made up by hopeful SEOs. Even the core llms.txt spec is still evolving since Jeremy Howard proposed it last year.
Whether AI bots follow your llms.txt or not, these practices make your content more accessible to any system trying to parse it. You can see it as foundational SEO methods + tweaking your content for AIs to read easily, backed by a lot of insightful data and context. In my personal experience, I’ve seen 28% increase in AI bots crawling and indexing content after parsing LLMs.txt files uploaded to root folder. You can use any plugin like rank math or yoast SEO if you are using wordpress, or just any other script you can find it on github that generates LLMs.txt file for your site.
