Does llms.txt actually do anything?
Google has now answered this in its own documentation. The answer is no, and the file has been sold to a lot of people.
- Google's own documentation says Search does not use AI text files.
- No major AI crawler documents consuming llms.txt.
- It spread because it is cheap to sell and impossible for a buyer to disprove.
- What governs assistant access is robots.txt, HTML content and non-contradiction.
The short answer
For Google Search, including its AI features, llms.txt does nothing. Google’s own documentation says so directly.
No major AI crawler documents consuming it either. If someone quoted you for adding one, you paid for a file nothing reads.
What Google actually published
Google Search Central’s AI optimisation guidance, updated 10 July 2026, states: “You don’t need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, markup, or Markdown to appear in Google Search (including its generative AI capabilities), as Google Search itself doesn’t use them.”
That is about as unambiguous as platform documentation gets. Google staff have separately compared llms.txt to the keywords meta tag, on the grounds that no AI service used it and bots did not request the file.
OpenAI’s crawler documentation describes robots.txt and published IP ranges. OpenAI does publish an llms.txt for its own documentation index, which is a different thing from its crawler consuming yours, and the two get conflated in vendor pitches.
Why it spread
It is cheap to produce, easy to sell and impossible for a buyer to disprove. A file that costs an hour and produces no measurable change is the ideal upsell, because nothing happens either way.
It also arrived at the right moment, when owners were being told AI visibility was a new discipline requiring new artefacts. The proposal that a new file was needed felt plausible.
What actually governs whether an assistant can use your page
Whether the crawler is allowed in. That is robots.txt, and it is worth checking which AI user agents you are blocking by accident.
Whether the content is in the HTML rather than appearing only after script execution.
Whether the page answers a question in the first eighty words, in language a model can lift without ambiguity.
Whether your facts agree with each other across your site, your profile and the directories. Contradiction is the most common reason a business gets skipped.
None of that requires a new file. All of it requires the existing pages to be right, which is slower and harder to sell.
“A file that costs an hour and produces no measurable change is the ideal upsell, because nothing happens either way.”
Questions owners ask
Youssef runs visibility work for established local businesses: Google Maps, organic search and AI answers, measured monthly against a published protocol. Where a number cannot be checked, it does not go in the report.
More about Youssef