What is an LLMS.txt file? It’s the AI equivalent of a robots.txt or sitemap.xml file for SEO.
Robots.txt and sitemap.xml files provide information for search engines about the content of your website in a standard format. The robots.txt file typically tells search engines to ignore certain pages on your site for indexing purposes. They don’t have to ignore them but they usually do. As an example, WordPress sites typically have robots.txt files that include lines like “Disallow: /wp-includes/” which tells the search engines not to bother indexing files that control how the site looks or behaves because that information is rarely of use to anyone.
The sitemap.xml file tells search engines the urls of all the pages on your site that you want them to know about and index so that they might appear in search results. When you add a new page to your site, it’s important to update your sitemap.xml so that the next time a search engine crawls (scans) your site, it will find the new page.
The llms.txt file takes on this function but for llms – large language model AI systems. At this stage (December 2025) it seems fair to say that an internet-wide standard for llms.txt contents hasn’t yet been agreed and in any case everything related to LLMs is rapidly changing but the concept of an llms.txt file is something all SEO and multi engine optimisation professionals should be aware of.
Here’ the current llms.txt file for this site, generated by Yoast.
Generated by Yoast SEO v26.5, this is an llms.txt file, meant for consumption by LLMs. The XML sitemap of this website can be found by following [this link](https://virtualcaio.com/sitemap_index.xml). # virtual CAIO: AI for Business ## Pages - [Cookie Policy \(UK\)](https://virtualcaio.com/cookie-policy-uk) - [How Businesses Can Use AI for Competitor Analysis](https://virtualcaio.com/ai-competitor-analysis) - [Inventory optimisation using AI made simple](https://virtualcaio.com/inventory-optimisation) - [What is a CAIO?](https://virtualcaio.com/caio-meaning) - [Prompt Database](https://virtualcaio.com/prompt-database) ## Posts - [MultiEO \- SEO, AIEO and GEO combined](https://virtualcaio.com/multieo-multi-engine-optimisation) - [What Is a Virtual CAIO?](https://virtualcaio.com/what-is-a-virtual-caio) - [The Rise of the Virtual CAIO](https://virtualcaio.com/the-rise-of-the-virtual-caio) ## Categories - [Management](https://virtualcaio.com/category/management) - [C\-Suite](https://virtualcaio.com/category/c-suite) - [Prompting](https://virtualcaio.com/category/prompting) - [Applications](https://virtualcaio.com/category/applications) - [Marketing](https://virtualcaio.com/category/marketing)