Short answer: No. llms.txt is not mandatory and does not create AI visibility on its own. Proposed by Jeremy Howard in 2024, it is not an official standard, and Google has said it does not use the file and has no plans to. Some AI tools can read it, so it is a sensible, low-cost complement once the fundamentals are done.
- Most useful for software and SaaS documentation that developers feed to AI assistants.
- A modest extra for corporate service sites; e-commerce stores should list categories and policy pages, not every product.
- It does not allow or block crawlers; that is the job of robots.txt.
The sensible order is crawler access, technical SEO, structured data and citable content first, then llms.txt, then measurement. Avoid promotional exaggeration and never hide instructions for AI systems in the file. Because AI Overviews and AI Mode run on Google’s infrastructure, llms.txt plays no role there. On Racoun’s own platform the file is generated automatically from site content and is one of seven components of the GEO service.
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