Introduction
With so many strategies for showing up in search, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. That’s why our goal at Ripenn is to cut through the noise and keep creators ahead with optimal strategies, like llms.txt, a new standard for influencing how generative search engines like ChatGPT interact with your site.
In this blog, we explain what llms.txt is, why it’s a good idea to create the file, and how Ripenn can help future-proof your content for this evolving search environment.
You can test if your website has an llms.txt file using our checker tool. We also score you based on formatting and give feedback!
1. What is llms.txt?
Many automation bots have likely been accessing your site for years, collecting information, interacting with your content, and sometimes even maliciously pretending to be real users. For example, Google indexes your page onto its Search Engine Results Page (SERP) using what they call Googlebot.
A text file called robots.txt has been the standard way of instructing these bots where they are allowed to go on your site (you can check ours out here). This robots.txt file is publicly accessible. You simply type /robots.txt after any domain name into your browser’s address bar to view it. Generative search engines can access them the same way (well… without any actual fingers doing the typing).
The llms.txt file serves a similar function but specifically targets generative AI models like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude, as well as agents built on top of them. It allows you to clearly state:
- What your website or page is about
- Where to find answers to specific questions in your page (with links)
- Important notes about your content and how to use it
Right now, it’s a good future-proofing strategy to help you compete for your spot in generative search responses. In the future, it might become a minimum requirement for your content to show up at all.
2. Why llms.txt Matters
Generative models regularly skip or misinterpret sections of content. This is because they try to conserve energy when navigating the web. That means using as few “tokens” as possible to respond to a query. A token is the smallest unit of text that a language model can process. Each one might be a word, a punctuation mark, or a bit of formatting. The fewer tokens needed to understand and summarize your content, the more efficiently an engine can use it.
The llms.txt standard is like a clear map (with shortcuts), helping AI agents find what they need, without wasting valuable tokens or missing key insights. Even if your content perfectly answers someone’s question, if that answer is buried deep somewhere in your site it may never get seen. If your website takes too many steps to parse, the model gives up and surfaces someone else’s clearer content instead.
3. How llms.txt Actually Looks
We walk the talk! Based on the llms.txt guidelines, here’s what Ripenn’s llms.txt file looks like:
If you’re unfamiliar with Markdown… if this looks too difficult or tedious to get right, reach out! Ripenn can help by creating this for you.
Beyond setup, we’ll monitor and continuously optimize your llms.txt implementation as part of our full suite of services.
Conclusion
Keeping up with the latest and best ways to make your content visible is hard! It’s important to keep evolving your strategy as the landscape changes. The llms.txt file is gaining traction as one of the most exciting future-proofing strategies to increase the likelihood of your content appearing in a generative engine’s response. As new strategies keep appearing, our goal is to take the stress off your shoulders so you can stay focused on creating great content, while we handle the part about making sure people (and models) actually see it.