llms.txt: A concise guide to your public content
Publish useful context and links without assuming every agent will discover or follow them.
Reviewed against Optimly’s implementation on .
A proposal, not a universal crawler contract
The llms.txt proposal describes a Markdown resource containing context, guidance and links for agents. Publishing it does not establish that every model reads it, prioritizes it or treats it as authoritative. Agent capabilities vary; the previous claim that LLMs cannot parse navigation or execute JavaScript was too broad.
How Optimly uses it
Optimly’s site-level llms.txt describes Brand Index, BrandVault, provenance and the supported resource URLs. Each brand also has a plain-text representation at /brand/{slug}/llms.txt, using the same public record as its HTML and JSON representations.
These are Optimly’s URL conventions. A consumer must request or follow them; the filename does not itself cause retrieval. The public index does not contain AI Visibility report scores.
A small example
Use public, maintained URLs and concise factual descriptions. This illustrative file is for your own website:
# Example Company
> Tools for scheduling field-service teams.
## Public resources
- [Product](https://example.com/product): Features and supported use cases.
- [Pricing](https://example.com/pricing): Current plans and terms.
- [Documentation](https://example.com/docs): Setup and API reference.No fixed token count guarantees retrieval quality. Keep the file useful for your intended consumers and keep the underlying pages accurate.
Maintain and verify
- Serve the resource successfully without requiring a browser login if it is intended to be public.
- Check every linked URL and remove stale product or pricing claims.
- Check text encoding, content type and readable structure.
- Update your own file as part of your publishing workflow; Optimly does not deploy files to your website.
- Use server logs to observe fetches and reports to inspect tested answers. Neither proves universal adoption.
Keep your published record useful
Review your brand information, its sources and its dates. Check the public record after publishing, and use reports to understand the answers actually observed.