The increased use of AI changes the way people discover companies and services online. While your website for conventional search engines can be optimized, LLMS (Langual Language Models) process the information from your website. Our new feature, llms.txt offers to close the gap. Yoast SEO generates a file that highlights the most important and current content of your website as an invitation for LLMS to the right picture. It is automatic, does not require a technical setup and is ready in one click.
Help AI to understand your website
In contrast to search engines that regularly crawl and indexing, LLMs such as Chatgpt and Google Gemini work differently. You do not save a website content for future use. Instead, you collect information in real time when you answer user inquiries.
This means that LLMs often only access a small part of a website while looking for answers. This applies in particular to large websites such as news platforms or E -Commerce stores. This can lead to incomplete or even inaccurate answers from AI-generated AI generated. Not ideal if you want to improve your visibility in LLM-generated answers as part of your marketing strategy.
If you want to understand better, according to which LLMS pay attention to access to websites, this guide offers a helpful overview to optimize content for LLMS.
What is an llms.txt file?
The LLMS.txt file offers LLMS a proposed, prepared amount of your website, in which its most important and latest content is highlighted.
Imagine it like a helpful guide at the entrance of a large department store. Imagine you go to socks. Someone welcomes you and gives you a shop card where the socks are located, together with other important departments such as shoes, checkout and customer service. Not you have To use the card, you can hike around alone, but it makes it much easier to find quickly what you are looking for.
This file LLMS also helps to quickly identify the most relevant and useful parts of your website. While the models can still explore other areas, it increases a clear guide that you increase the likelihood that you will determine the correct information in your answers.
How does it differ from robots.txt?
Robots.txt
- Says bots what not access
- Focuses on permission
- Is used for indexing and crawling search engines
- Supported by traditional search engines
llms.txt
- Suggests what ai should read
- Focuses on instructions and clarity
- AI helps to answer user questions more precisely
- Designed for large language models like Chatgpt
How does Yoast SEO llms.txt work?
If you offer the function, you automatically generate a LLMS.txt file for your website using a mixture of relevant website data. It draws ::
- Your last updated content
- Technical SEO elements like your sitemap for the context
- Descriptions that you have added to your website
This offers great -language models a website summary to understand what your website is and what content is most important.
Manage your llms.txt file
The plugin creates and manages the LLMS.txt file automatically and updates every week. You can approach the file in the file to ensure that it reflects your brand exactly and prioritize the correct content before the implementation.
Would you like to check the full control or prefer to manage it yourself? Find out how to add an LLMS.txt file to your website by visiting our developer documentation.
At Yoast, our Mission SEO is for everyone
Setting up a llms.txt file can only be accessible for some technical few. By automating the process, we make it easier for all website owners to benefit from this new technology without having to dive into code.
At Yoast, we believe that everyone should have a say in how their content is seen and used. Especially when AI plays a larger role in the online discovery of information. For this reason, we presented this function as an opt-in so that you can decide whether and when it makes sense for your website. We saw early signs that this is something that more website owners think about.
Just as Robots.txt tries to understand search engines what to index, LLMS.txt suggests which parts of your website should pay attention to large language models. If you want to see what a llms.txt file looks like in practice, you can display the live version on yoast.com.