llms.txt and llms-full.txt
The two files, what belongs in each, and the blocks that do the real work: key facts, negative statements, the content index and citation guidance.
4 min read · updated 2026-07-26· last reviewed 2026-07-26
llms.txt is a proposed convention, not a standard. No engine is obliged to read it and none of them publicly commit to doing so.
Ship it anyway, for three reasons. It costs one route. It is machine-readable in a way your HTML is not. And the discipline of writing a canonical answer per likely question improves the visible page copy as a side effect, which is a return you get whether or not any crawler ever fetches the file.
The rest of "llms.txt and llms-full.txt"
817 words covering 3 sections, with the implementation code for 2 checks. The table of contents below is the full outline, so you can see exactly what is behind this.
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What this chapter covers
- What these files are, honestly
- The principle
- The two files
- The blocks that matter
- The entity definition
- Key facts
- What this is not
- The content index, in llms-full.txt
- Citation guidance
- The implementation
- Generate both from typed config
- Serve as plain text with a real cache header
Checks this chapter covers
Each one has a command you can run against your own site.