BlogTechnical
Do you need an llms.txt? What Google and the rest really do with it
· 1 min read · 3 sources
Search Engine Roundtable
Search Engine Journal
Search Engine Land
llms.txt is a text file in the root of your site, listing your most important pages in a form language models read easily. The idea sounds logical, and many agencies recommend it. But what do the search engines themselves say about it?
Google: Search does not use it
Gary Illyes of Google said in 2025 that Google does not support llms.txt and has no plans to. John Mueller compared it to the old keywords meta tag: something you can fill in, but that search engines do nothing with.
When it turned out some of Google's own sites had an llms.txt, Mueller said this is not an endorsement. An internal system had added it and a few teams had left it in place.
And the AI companies?
The big AI companies have not publicly confirmed that their search and answer systems read an llms.txt on other sites. Some developer tools and in-house search systems do use it, for example to load documentation.
What does this mean for you?
- An llms.txt does no harm and is quick to make. Just do not expect it to get you into the answers of ChatGPT, Gemini or Google.
- What does work: make sure the AI crawlers may read your site (check your robots.txt), that your key information is on the page as plain text, and that structured data says who you are and what you do.
- Above all: be on the sites the assistants cite. That is where most of their sources come from.
Get AI to recommend you
Oddrank measures every week whether ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Google name you, shows who is named instead, and sets out what to do about it.