llms.txt is a proposed convention, not a standard anyone must honour. It costs almost nothing and some crawlers already look for it. Treat it as a cheap, clearly-labelled bet rather than a ranking mechanism.
---
name: llms-txt-authoring
description: Use when you want to tell assistants which of your pages are authoritative, and be honest with yourself about what that does and does not achieve.
---
# llms.txt authoring
llms.txt is a proposed convention, not a standard anyone must honour. It costs almost nothing and some crawlers already look for it. Treat it as a cheap, clearly-labelled bet rather than a ranking mechanism.
## What you need first
- Your canonical page list
- A one-sentence description of what the site is
## Method
1. Open with the site name and a single sentence stating what it is, in plain language rather than marketing copy.
2. List only pages you would want quoted. A dump of every URL defeats the purpose, which is signalling priority.
3. Give each entry a descriptive title rather than a slug, since the title is the context an assistant reads.
4. Use absolute URLs. Relative paths are ambiguous once the file is read out of context.
5. State attribution preferences plainly if you have them. There is no enforcement, but the statement is free.
6. Publish at the site root, then verify it is publicly reachable and served as plain text, not HTML.
## What this produces
A short llms.txt at the root naming the pages you want cited, with titles and absolute URLs.
## Where this goes wrong
- Believing it is a standard with guaranteed effect - it is neither
- Listing every URL, which signals nothing
- Serving it with an HTML content type, which some fetchers reject
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From the QuQi skill library - https://www.quqi.io/skills/llms-txt-authoring
Free to download · no account, no email
A short llms.txt at the root naming the pages you want cited, with titles and absolute URLs.