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Is llms.txt file a scam?
Posted by on April 21, 2026 at 5:54 pmBeen researching ways to make my website more visible in AI search (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini…). Came across llms.txt and have seen a lot of contradictory posts about it.
Anyone working at Anthropic, OpenAI or Google that can confirm if it's actually used? 😀
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1 Reply
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Yes to the title
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It’s not a scam. It’s a well-intentioned attempt to create a viable protocol (think of Schema but for AI), but they didn’t take into account that it would go against the very essence of how LLMs consume and process content, which is why all LLMs ignore it and always will.
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It’s not going to harm your citations, might as well have it on the ready.
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Right now , it’s useless I think
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It’s not supported by any AI so it’s only a scam if you try to sell it as a service
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Yes
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just do SEO. there is nothing else proven to help you get more citations. doing “research” will only lead you to the snake oil salesman.
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Yes. A big one
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Just came out of a live session with folks from Google at the Toronto office, and this got asked in the audience. Their answer is no, LLM.txt is not needed or required. Make on if it gets your manager or client off your back because having one won’t help you or hurt you. I think comes as no surprise to anyone here 😅
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what worked for me with a new website is answering questions related to my field on Reddit (I think the same would apply to Quora too). I think for ChatGPT, Reddit is the number one source, then Wikipedia, YouTube, etc.
That said, I don’t recommend aggressively promoting your site on these platforms (especially Quora and Reddit), otherwise your account would get banned.
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As someone said earlier, I won’t do any harm to have it. I use them on all sites as (obviously) an overview of the context. It only reaffirms what the site is about.
I find schemas and well thought of website structure to be far more efficient for ai visibility than anything else, with the exception of good basic SEO.
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[removed]
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It’s not. I’m sure I’ll get downvoted and I understand exactly why, but I have seen direct and very clear proof of Claude looking for it. Claude will even report 404s if it can’t find it when it decides to go looking for it.
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I added a llms.txt recently and started monitoring the activity on that page. My website gets crawled a lot by a lot of different bots. Every page receives bot traffic including robots.txt and sitemap. But no bot has crawled my llms.txt so far. And yes it’s mentioned in the robots.txt.
I think some people are trying hard to make it a standard, but until now it is doing little to nothing i think.
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A scam? No.
Useful? Also no.
Anthropic /does/ looking for an LLMs.txt though.
It’s just in no way universal or standardized.
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