AEO · llms.txt · 3 min read
The llms.txt debate is noise
Whether Google honours llms.txt isn't the right question. The right question: what do you publish on yours?
Half the SEO discourse on llms.txt is whether it 'works'. Wrong question. llms.txt is a pointer file — a markdown index of your most important URLs. Whether Google reads it is irrelevant.
What matters: ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity crawlers do read it. They use it to weight which of your URLs to ingest. Sites with a clean, current llms.txt get cited more in AI answers. That's the only metric that matters.
Publish one. Keep it under 50 lines. Lead with the URLs you want cited, not the ones you have.
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