Free tool
The llms.txt Generator writes a spec-valid file, not a dump.
RankX AI reads your sitemap, picks the pages that matter, writes their notes from your own metadata, and validates the result against the llms.txt specification before you see it.
Free. No account. We read your sitemap and up to 60 pages, one request at a time, honouring your robots.txt. Results cache for 24 hours.
What this generates
A valid llms.txt is small, ordered, and stricter than most tools respect.
The llms.txt Generator follows the published grammar: one required element, a short structure, validated output. Most generators ignore it and emit a sitemap dump in markdown clothing.
The grammar, in five rules
- 1. One H1 naming the site. It is the only required element in the whole format.
- 2. An optional blockquote directly after it, carrying a short summary a model should read first.
- 3. Optional prose next, with no headings of any level other than the H1 and the H2 section headers.
- 4. H2 sections last, each a markdown list whose entries are a link, name and URL, with an optional colon and note.
- 5. An H2 named Optional has reserved meaning: agents may skip it when context is short, so the long tail belongs there.
Files can also live at subpaths such as /docs/llms.txt, and the specification says agents should use the most specific file covering a URL.
Mechanically it is a plain text file, like robots.txt, and it is not a sitemap.xml replacement: a sitemap lists every URL for search engines to crawl, while llms.txt hands AI models a short curated reading order with none of your navigation, cookie banners or footer chrome around it. That is the whole appeal to anyone building on ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, and the whole reason to create one by hand rather than dumping a URL list.
What a valid file looks like
# Example Site > Example Site helps small teams do a specific thing well. ## Key pages - [Pricing](https://example.com/pricing): plans, numbers, billing answers - [About](https://example.com/about) ## Documentation - [Quick start](https://example.com/docs/start): setup in ten minutes ## Optional - [Changelog](https://example.com/changelog)
Grammar per llmstxt.org, verified 16 August 2026.
The honest part
Almost nobody reads these files yet, and you deserve that fact up front.
Every competing generator sells llms.txt as an AI visibility tactic. The measured evidence says it is not one, and a tool built by an AI search company owes you the measurements.
97% of files receive zero requests
Ahrefs studied 137,210 domains in 2026. About 28% publish an llms.txt, and 97% of those files got no requests at all in the month measured. Of the few that were fetched, most requests came from SEO audit tools, and AI retrieval bots were roughly 1%. Publishing the file is cheap; expecting traffic from it is not supported by anything measured.
Google says it plainly
Google's John Mueller compared llms.txt to the keywords meta tag: a site owner's claim about their own site, which engines can check by simply reading the site. He also noted server logs show AI services do not fetch the file. No AI vendor, OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity or Mistral, documents consuming yours, even though all of them publish the file for their own docs.
The fabricated directive to avoid
A claim circulates that Anthropic honours a Commercial-Use directive inside llms.txt, sometimes with a whole invented field set around it. It appears in no version of the specification and no vendor documentation, and AI search summaries now repeat it as fact. If you want to control training use of your content, robots.txt tokens are the documented mechanism, and our crawler checker tests them.
Publishing it
Serve the file at your site root, then treat it like content you own.
The generator hands you a starting point built from your own sitemap and metadata. Three habits make it worth keeping.
Put it at /llms.txt
Serve the file as plain text at the root of your site, beside robots.txt. A documentation section that deserves its own index can carry a second file at /docs/llms.txt, and the most specific file wins for the URLs it covers.
Edit before you publish
The generator ranks pages by sitemap structure and depth, which is a good guess and only a guess. You know which ten pages actually explain your business; promote them, cut the rest, and keep the file under about fifty links so truncation never eats anything that matters.
Update it when pages change
A stale index is worse than none, because the one consumer it might get is being pointed at the wrong pages. Keep the file in version control with your site, regenerate after significant content changes, and re-run this tool any time; repeat runs inside a day return the cached result instantly.
Keep going
One file moves nothing by itself: these checks measure what does.
AI visibility is decided by crawler access, page mechanics and what Google's AI surfaces cite. Each has a free check here.
Questions
What people ask before publishing an llms.txt.
Including the questions whose honest answer is that the evidence says no.
What is llms.txt?
llms.txt is a proposed markdown file at the root of a website that gives language models a curated index of the site’s most useful pages. The format, proposed by Jeremy Howard of Answer.AI, is deliberately small: one H1 with the site name, which is the only required element, an optional blockquote summary, optional prose, and then H2 sections whose entries are markdown links with optional notes. It is a suggestion to models, not a control, and no engine is obliged to read it.
Does Google use llms.txt?
No. Google’s John Mueller compared llms.txt to the keywords meta tag: a site owner’s claim about their own content that engines can simply verify by reading the site. He also noted that server logs show the AI services do not even fetch the file. Nothing published since has changed that position, so generate an llms.txt for the cheap upside if you want one, but do not expect it to move Google rankings or AI Overviews.
Does any AI company actually read llms.txt?
None commits to it, and the measured traffic is close to zero. Ahrefs studied 137,210 domains in 2026: 28% publish an llms.txt, and 97% of those files received no requests at all in the month measured. Of the tiny fraction of files that were fetched, most requests came from SEO audit tools, and AI retrieval bots were about 1%. OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity all publish llms.txt files for their own documentation, but none of the three documents ever reading yours.
Why offer an llms.txt generator at all, then?
Because the demand is real, the cost is nothing, and an honest generator beats a hyped one. More than a quarter of studied domains publish the file, standards need adoption before consumption, and the file doubles as a clean, human-readable map of your best pages that coding agents and documentation tools already use. What RankX AI will not do is sell llms.txt as an AI visibility tactic, because the evidence says it is not one. The generator exists so that if you want the file, you get a correct, curated one in seconds.
What makes an llms.txt file valid?
The spec is stricter than most generators respect. A valid file has exactly one H1 naming the site, and that H1 is the only required block. After it come, in order, an optional blockquote summary, optional prose with no further headings, and then H2 sections containing markdown lists where each entry is a link in the form of a name and URL, optionally followed by a colon and a note. No H3s, no tables, no HTML. This generator validates its own output against those rules before handing it to you.
What is the Optional section?
An H2 section literally named Optional has reserved meaning by convention: it marks links an AI agent can skip when it is short of context space. Everything above it is what you most want a model to read; everything under Optional is the long tail. That is also why order matters everywhere else in the file, because a model that truncates reads from the top.
What is llms-full.txt?
llms-full.txt is a documentation-platform convention, not part of the llms.txt specification, which never mentions it. Platforms such as Mintlify and Fumadocs generate it as the entire documentation corpus concatenated into one file, so an agent can ingest everything in a single fetch. It makes sense for docs sites and very little sense for a marketing site, so this generator deliberately produces only llms.txt and leaves llms-full.txt to the platforms that build it from their own source.
Is there a Commercial-Use directive for llms.txt?
No. A claim circulates that Anthropic honours a Commercial-Use directive inside llms.txt, sometimes expanded into a whole invented directive set with Training-Data and Citation-Required fields. It appears in no version of the specification and in no vendor documentation from Anthropic or anyone else, and it traces back to a single SEO blog post that cites no source. Be careful: AI search summaries repeat it as fact. If you want to control training use, robots.txt tokens are the documented mechanism.
Why does the generator cap the file at around 50 links?
Because curation is the entire point of the format. An llms.txt that mirrors your whole sitemap is just a worse sitemap, and models that truncate long context lose whatever you put at the bottom. The generator ranks pages, keeps roughly the best fifty, orders sections by importance and writes each link’s note from the page’s own meta description, so what survives truncation is what you would have chosen anyway. Dumping every URL is the measured weakness of most competing generators.
How does the generator build the file?
The generator reads your sitemap, or discovers it from robots.txt, fetches up to 100 pages politely at one request at a time while honouring your robots.txt, and extracts each page’s title and meta description. It then groups pages into sections, ranks them, and writes a spec-valid file with your homepage’s description as the blockquote summary. You can edit anything before you publish it, and repeat runs inside 24 hours return the cached result instantly.
Where do I put the file once I have it?
Serve it at the root of your site as /llms.txt, next to robots.txt. The spec also allows files at subpaths, such as /docs/llms.txt, and says agents should use the most specific file that covers a URL, which is useful when your documentation deserves its own index. Serve it as plain text or markdown, keep it in version control like any other content, and update it when your key pages change.
How is llms.txt different from robots.txt?
They point in opposite directions. robots.txt says what crawlers may not fetch, is a published standard, and the major AI vendors document how their bots treat it. llms.txt says what models should read first, is a proposal with no committed consumers, and carries no enforcement at all. A site can sensibly have both: robots.txt as the access policy, llms.txt as the curated index. Our AI Crawler Access Checker covers the first; this generator covers the second.
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