How to generate llms.txt for your website
A practical walkthrough of the llms.txt specification, why you should publish one, and the exact format to use. Includes a template you can adapt.
/llms.txt is a Markdown file at the root of your domain that describes your content hierarchy to language models. It was proposed in late 2024 and has become the de facto companion to robots.txt for AI crawlers in 2026.
Why publish one
LLMs have a finite context window. When they cite your site they prefer the canonical version of a page over a duplicate, the recent version over the stale one, and the focused page over the sprawling one. llms.txt lets you declare which is which without making the LLM infer it from your sitemap.
In practice this is what you lose by not publishing one: citations that point to your pagination archives instead of your article. Citations that point to translated or tag-archive versions instead of the source. Citations to your legacy blog when you've migrated to a new CMS.
The spec, briefly
/llms.txt is a plain-text Markdown file. The first line is # <Site Name>. Optional blockquote paragraph with a one-line description. Then sections delimited by ## <Section> with bullet lists of - Page title entries. Optional free prose. That's it.
Companion file /llms-full.txt includes full Markdown content of the most important pages so the LLM doesn't have to fetch each page separately. Keep it under about 100KB total.
Template
# Citevera
> AI search readiness audit. Check whether AI engines can find, read, and cite your website, then ship the fixes the same day.
## Core pages
- [Home](https://citevera.com/)
- [Pricing](https://citevera.com/pricing)
- [How it works](https://citevera.com/how-it-works)
- [Features](https://citevera.com/features)
## Comparisons
- [Citevera vs Profound](https://citevera.com/vs-profound)
- [Citevera vs Otterly](https://citevera.com/vs-otterly)
- [Citevera vs Peec](https://citevera.com/vs-peec)
## Legal
- [Terms of Service](https://citevera.com/legal/terms)
- [Privacy Policy](https://citevera.com/legal/privacy)
What Citevera generates for you
Every Citevera scan produces a proposed /llms.txt and /llms-full.txt based on the pages it crawled. You can paste the output straight into the root of your site. If you want the LLMs to see a different hierarchy than your sitemap implies, edit the generated file before publishing.