Concept · Optimization practice
llms.txt
Definition
A proposed file at a site's root that lists its documents in a form built for language models to read.
What it means in practice
It follows a published convention: a title, a summary, and sections of links, with each link pointing at a plain-text or markdown version of the page. No major engine has confirmed it uses the file for retrieval or ranking, so adopting it is a bet on convention rather than a measured tactic. Its defensible benefit is immediate and separate from search: an agent handed the file gets clean prose instead of scraped HTML. refd publishes one at /llms.txt.
How refd treats it
This is category vocabulary, not a refd metric. refd measures what AI answers actually said across repeated runs, and publishes the raw answer behind every number. Where a term above carries a claim about what causes visibility, refd treats that claim as a hypothesis to test rather than a setting to configure.
This definition is editorial. It describes how the term is used across the field rather than something the software computes, so unlike the metric pages it is not generated from the product.
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