Why Your Content Needs to Speak AI Now
For years, optimizing for search engines like Google has been the gold standard for web visibility. You had your sitemap.xml, clean URLs, structured data, and meta tags dialed in. You played the SEO game and ranked. But now, a new player is on the field—and it doesn't play by the same rules.
Meet the large language models (LLMs): ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and others. These AI systems aren't just crawling the web; they're consuming it, summarizing it, and serving it back to users in conversational formats. And unless you've optimized your site for them, you're likely invisible.
What Is llms.txt?
llms.txt is a new emerging standard—a simple, Markdown-formatted file that outlines your site's structure and content in a way that's easy for AI agents to understand. Think of it like sitemap.xml, but made for language models.
Paired with llms-full.txt, which provides a plaintext or Markdown version of your actual page content, these files enable LLMs to:
- Find and understand your content quickly
- Skip parsing bloated HTML
- Retrieve relevant info in fewer tokens (faster and cheaper)
Why We Built It at Purple Horizons
At Purple Horizons, we’re always experimenting with the next wave of technology. We wanted our content—event recaps, AI experiments, product launches—to be visible not just to humans or search engines, but to LLMs powering tomorrow’s discovery tools.
We used our modern stack (Next.js + Sanity + Cursor AI) to roll out:
- /llms.txt: A Markdown outline of our most important pages
- /llms-full.txt: A full, plaintext dump of our blog, events, and guides
- Integrated into robots.txt so agents know where to look
It took under an hour to set up—and it's already helping.
The Shift to GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
This isn’t SEO 2.0. It’s a different discipline.
- LLMs don’t index like Google
- They tokenize, embed, and retrieve
- They value clarity, simplicity, and context
Tools like Profound are already showing that LLMs from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Microsoft are crawling these files. And platforms like Vercel have reported up to 10% of signups originating from ChatGPT links.
If your content isn’t LLM-readable, you’re not in the game.
What You Can Do Right Now
Build an llms.txt that summarizes your content in clean Markdown.
Add llms-full.txt with full plaintext versions of your high-value content.
Expose them in your robots.txt like this:
LLMs: https://yoursite.com/llms.txt
Use a modern stack (Next.js, Astro, Sanity, etc.) to generate these dynamically.
Monitor performance using tools like Profound, and track AI referrals if possible.
Final Thoughts
The web is shifting from search-first to chat-first.
We’re not just building for Google anymore—we’re building for AI. And if your site isn’t ready for LLMs to read and retrieve, you might be speaking into the void.
Want help implementing llms.txt in your stack? Shoot us a note at Purple Horizons.
