llms.txt

Silktide checks whether your website publishes an llms.txt file, a short curated index at the site root that tells AI assistants what your site contains and where its most important content lives. It also checks that the file starts with the required title heading.

The convention is similar in spirit to and sitemap.xml: a plain Markdown file at https://yoursite.com/llms.txt with a title and links to key pages:

# Example Company

> Example Company makes accounting software for small businesses.

## Docs

- [Getting started](https://example.com/docs/start): Setup guide
- [Pricing](https://example.com/pricing): Plans and costs

Why this matters

As AI assistants become a discovery channel, giving them a purpose-built index may improve how they summarize and link to your site. Rather than leaving an assistant to infer your site's structure from whatever pages it happens to fetch, llms.txt states it directly.

The convention is young. No major AI provider has confirmed that it reads llms.txt files on other people's sites, and Google has said they neither help nor harm. So this check is a review item: it shows you whether the file is there and does not affect your score. It is never a substitute for making your pages themselves readable and well described.

How to fix it

Write a Markdown file that opens with a single # title (your site or company name), an optional one-line summary as a > blockquote, and short link lists to your most important pages grouped under ## headings.
Publish it at your domain root so it is reachable at https://yoursite.com/llms.txt.
Keep it curated and current - a handful of genuinely important links is more useful than a dump of every URL.

If the file exists but is flagged as malformed, add the missing # Title heading as the first line - it is the one element the format requires.

How Silktide tests this

Fetch /llms.txt from your website's root.
If the file is missing or empty, report that no llms.txt was found.
If the file exists but has no level-1 Markdown heading (# Title), report that the required title is missing.

The check tests the file's presence and required title only; it does not judge the quality of the links you include.

Troubleshooting

Is llms.txt worth it if AI providers don't all read it yet?

It is optional. The file costs a few minutes to create and nothing to serve, so some sites publish one in case assistants take it up. If you decide it is not worth maintaining for your site, the finding. It does not affect your score either way.