llms.txt is a proposed Markdown file a website can publish to give AI tools a short, clean guide to its content, with links to the pages that matter.
In plain words
Web pages are built for people, wrapped in menus, ads and scripts that waste an AI model's limited context. The llms.txt proposal, by Jeremy Howard, suggests a Markdown file at a site's root with brief background, guidance and links to clean Markdown versions of key pages. Agents can read it first, then follow only the links they need. Documentation platforms such as Mintlify generate one automatically.
A quick example
Imagine a coding agent that needs to call a library correctly. Instead of scraping many HTML pages, it fetches the library site's /llms.txt, sees a short list of documentation links with one-line descriptions, and opens only the page about the function it needs.
Where you'll meet it
- Developer documentation sites.
- Sites that want AI assistants to read them accurately.
Related
Sources
- DocsThe /llms.txt file, llmstxt.org (Jeremy Howard) · read 29 Sept 2026
- Docsllms.txt, Mintlify documentation · read 29 Sept 2026
Checked by WhatIsAI against the sources above · 29 Sept 2026. Spotted an error? Report it.