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Is llms.txt file a scam?
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No major LLM has confirmed crawling it. it’s a convention, not a signal. your time is better on structured data and an actual sitemap.
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Yes its a scam
But agencies can sell it as “geo optimization” for huge bags of money
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It’s not a scam but doesn’t help your visibility either. Do not bother and use your time in actually work on your SEO. 🙌🏻
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I do not have hands on experience with it but im pretty sure this file is useful only for cases where user’s request AI models to query technical websites for them, like read a library’s documentation.
I have seen some SaaS implement it and actually report good results from it.
I personally had this deployed on one of my blogs, In a span of 6+ months it got literally 0 hits, even when I myself asked AI (open-ai, perplexity, google antigravity) about my site. So yeah, cant really tell as it depends on the website itself -
it’s just something that GEO / AEO / HaGaYo boys hyped up to sell their useless services. LLM models don’t crawl it nor look for it.
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It’s not a scam but the way it’s been positioned isn’t great. Be clear if you’re talking to a client about it’s status (not adopted officially) and also, dont treat it like a sitemap.xml because that’s not what it is.
That being said, I set one up on a client site and had it added to the sitemap (llms don’t look for it but they’ll crawl it if you out it in front of them). I can confirm it has been crawled by the models including chatgpt, perplexity, and Claude. I have no proof yet it led to any benefit but it will be crawled
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