llms.txt is a proposed convention: a markdown index of your site’s key content, placed at the root for AI systems to read. Google has said it doesn’t use it, and no major AI provider has documented support for it. It costs nothing to have and moves little.
The proposal came from Jeremy Howard in September 2024, and the idea is reasonable – give language models a curated map instead of making them parse your whole site. Adoption ran ahead of consumption: thousands of sites publish one, and the SEO industry sells llms.txt optimization, but the companies that would need to read the file haven’t committed to it. Google’s Gary Illyes said plainly in July 2025 that Google doesn’t support llms.txt, and John Mueller compared it to the keywords meta tag – a signal so easy to game that consuming it makes no sense.
Our position, as a company that ships an llms.txt generator in our own plugin: have the file, spend your effort elsewhere. It’s one checkbox in Blaze AI Discovery because it’s cheap insurance if adoption ever arrives. The levers with confirmed consumption are crawler access, schema markup, machine-readable product pages, and a compliant product feed – see Why Is My Store Invisible to ChatGPT? for where to start.