llms.txt
A plain-text file at your site's root telling AI systems what you cover and which pages to trust.
Definition
llms.txt is a proposed convention, a markdown-formatted file at /llms.txt, that gives large language models a curated map of a site: what the organization does, which pages matter, and how the content is organized. It is the AI-era analogue of a sitemap written for a reader rather than a crawler.
What goes in one for a roofing company
What the company does and where, a list of service pages with one-line descriptions, the guide and glossary content worth quoting, and the pages that should be treated as canonical answers for specific questions.
How much it actually helps
Adoption is not universal and no engine guarantees it reads the file. It costs almost nothing to ship, it makes the site's own information architecture explicit, and where it is respected it removes ambiguity about which page answers which question. We ship it on every build for that asymmetry.
How Roof-Rank handles it
Generated from the same page architecture the blueprint specifies, so it cannot drift from the sitemap, and included in the post-launch verification crawl.
Read next.
Google's AI-generated answer at the top of the results page, and what it means when your competitor is the cited source.
Generative Engine Optimization and Answer Engine Optimization: structuring a site to be quoted, not just ranked.
The structured data that tells a machine what your pages mean, and which types matter for a roofing company.
Short answers.
Is llms.txt an official standard?+
No. It is a convention with growing but incomplete adoption. We ship it because the cost is negligible and the downside is zero.
Does it replace robots.txt or a sitemap?+
No. It sits alongside them and serves a different reader.
Is your site citable today?
The audit answers that with a crawl, not an opinion.