Almost Nobody Has an llms.txt. That Is Your Opening. (Part 2 of 3)
Last updated 2026-06-17
Very few sites publish an llms.txt, and most that do get it wrong. Here is why being early is cheap leverage, and how to write one that actually works.
- llms.txt
- GEO
- AI visibility
- content strategy
The internet is mostly empty here
Go check ten sites in your space. Add /llms.txt to each. Count how many exist.
It will be a small number. Often zero. And half of the ones that do exist are broken: a list of bare links with no title, or a wall of every URL on the site, or a file written for robots instead of readers.
This is what early looks like. Sitemaps looked like this in 2005. The people who showed up first did not need a bigger budget. They just showed up.
Early is leverage, and it is cheap
Most marketing advantages cost money. This one costs an afternoon.
When a model meets a clean, curated llms.txt, it has very little to compare it against. You are not competing with a million polished files. You are competing with silence. Silence is easy to beat.
The reward is simple. The model spends less effort guessing what you do, and more confidence saying it.
How to write one that works
Write it for a smart, busy human. The model will be fine.
- Lead with a one line summary a stranger could repeat back to you.
- Link the pages that answer real buyer questions: pricing, product, how it works, docs, comparisons.
- Give each link a short, plain description. No keyword stuffing.
- Group links into a few clear sections.
- Put anything optional in an Optional section so it can be skipped when context is tight.
The mistakes that quietly cost you
- Bare URLs instead of real markdown links. To a parser this reads as no links at all.
- No H1 title. It is the one required part, and skipping it makes the file invalid.
- Dumping the whole sitemap. The point is curation, not completeness.
- Writing for crawlers. Jargon and tricks help no one, and the model sees through them.
If your file has these problems, you are not penalized. You are just invisible in a different way.
You do not have to write it from scratch
You already have the raw material. Your pages, your tagline, the things you say about yourself. The work is choosing what matters and saying it cleanly.
CitationWorks reads your site and drafts a spec correct llms.txt for you, built from your real pages. You copy it, host it at /llms.txt, and move on with your day.