There is a small plain-text file at the root of this site addressed to machines that read prose. Google says it does not need it. We ship it anyway, and the reasons are worth a note.
What llms.txt is, and what Google says
llms.txt is an emerging convention: a markdown index at /llms.txt that tells AI assistants what a site is and where its substance lives, so a crawler with a small attention budget reads the right pages first. It is not a standard anyone enforces. Google has said plainly that its AI features need no special files – indexable pages and helpful content are the whole entry requirement – and nothing we have seen contradicts that.
Why we ship one anyway
Three reasons. It costs nothing: ours is a few lines of theme code. Google is not the only reader: assistants and agents that browse on a user’s behalf take cheap hints where they find them. And it forced a useful discipline: writing down, in one screen of text, what this site actually is and which pages matter.
Generated, not maintained
The detail we would defend to anyone: our llms.txt is generated, not maintained. The theme builds it from the published content itself – the product pages, every documentation page, every guide, the recent notes – so when a page is added or retitled, the file follows. A hand-kept index would have drifted within a month; we know, because our hand-kept FAQ schema once did.
If you run a local business
The honest answer: do the fundamentals first, in order – pages worth citing, titles that say what the page is, schema that matches what is visible, an about page that says who you are. If after all that your developer can add an llms.txt in an afternoon, take it. If anyone sells it to you as the secret to AI visibility, hold your wallet. The longer thinking is in how AI search finds local businesses.