Why a Small Text File Is Easy to Get Wrong
If you have a small or medium-sized business website, you’ve probably had somebody ask you, “Should we add an llms.txt file?” It’s a fair question. This little Markdown file at the root of your domain should serve as a map, guiding AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity to the most important pages. But here’s the thing: most business owners and even agencies who rush to make one do the same few avoidable things. The Common llms.txt Mistakes in this guide do not occur in uncommon edge cases either; they appear on real-life websites on a weekly basis. The exciting news is that all of them can be fixed in less than an hour if you know where to start.
Dumping Your Entire Sitemap Into the File
The most common mistake is that people take llms.txt as if it were a second sitemap.xml. Every URL that their CMS generates is exported, and the whole list is pasted in. Export and import of blog tags, category pages, old landing pages, paginated archives and so on.
Now this negates the whole point of using this file, which is to serve as a short, prioritized list of your best pages rather than a comprehensive one.
How to fix it: Choose 15-30 pages that are truly representative of who you are; your homepage, essential service pages, your most useful guides, and your contact page. The quality of curations is more important than the quantity.
Writing Vague, Copy-Paste Descriptions
Generic description text follows immediately after the link-dumping problem. However, statements such as “We offer innovative solutions for our customers” are entirely unhelpful to an AI model (and even a human reader). This sentence can apply to one million different businesses.
How to fix it: For each link, compose one sentence that describes what the page contains and who it is for. Empty marketing language is just not as helpful as this page that compares our three pricing tiers and what’s included in each.
Letting the File Go Stale
Most businesses only produce an llms.txt during their site’s initial installation and ignore it thereafter. Even months later, it will still talk about discontinued products, outdated pricing, or a service that’s no longer part of the company’s line of business. An obsolete document is better than no document, but putting an obsolete document into an AI is certainly worse.
How to fix it: Check and update the file each time a new page is opened, an old page is closed, or pricing changes. For most SMB sites, a quarterly check would be a good minimum.
Confusing llms.txt with robots.txt
There’s no wonder why they get confused! Both result from plain text files stored at the root of a domain! While robots.txt dictates who the robot is allowed to crawl, llms.txt is more like a table of contents that AI can use if you so desire. Some site owners attempt to use the same “Disallow” logic found in robots.txt within llms.txt, but this isn’t the format it’s designed for.
If you are interested in a side-by-side comparison of these files, we’ve created a detailed comparison of llms.txt, robots.txt, and sitemap.xml that you should definitely bookmark.
How to fix it: Make sure robots.txt is used only for crawl rules, and that llms.txt is used only for content curation and context.
Breaking Basic Markdown Formatting
Since there’s no schema like the one in JSON-LD, people end up being sloppy with the formatting of llms.txt. Using too many H1 tags, adding custom YAML front matter, or pasting in tables and images can cause the file to be silently misread or ignored by the systems that read it.
How to fix it: Avoid adding more than one H1 header, a summary paragraph, then several H2 sections with simple bulleted links. Run the file through a Markdown validator before publishing.
Exposing Pages That Should Stay Private
Some businesses end up including staging URLs, internal test pages, or draft content in their llms.txt, thinking it is not publicly available. It isn’t. Anyone, or anything, can request it directly from your domain.
How to fix it: Only ever list pages you’d be comfortable with any visitor finding. Sensitive or unfinished content should not be behind any hope of non-lookers, but behind proper authentication.
Expecting llms.txt to Replace Real SEO Work
This is less a technical mistake and more a strategic one, but it’s arguably the most damaging. Businesses sometimes consider placing an llms.txt file as a quick fix to be suddenly cited in AI-generated answers or showing up at the top of Google search results. This is not supported with evidence. If you want the full, data-backed picture of what this file can and can’t do for visibility, this breakdown of whether llms.txt actually improves SEO or AI citations is a useful next read.
How to fix it: Don’t dismiss llms.txt as a low-cost fix; rather, it’s a small addition to any site’s solid content, site structure, and topical authority.
Never Testing or Validating the File After Publishing
Finally, plenty of sites publish an llms.txt once and simply assume it works. They never check that the file actually loads at the root URL, returns the right content type, or reflects the latest version after a content migration.
How to fix it: Save yourdomain.com/llms.txt to the browser favorites bar and review it regularly, particularly after a redesign, migration, or CMS change. If you have yet to install one yourself, our step-by-step tutorial on how to create an llms.txt file does just that, explaining the installation process in detail.
Conclusion
Most Common llms.txt Mistakes are actually not difficult to fix: over-listing rather than curating, vague rather than specific description, stale file, linking it to robots.txt, not handling basic Markdown properly, revealing pages that shouldn’t be public, relying too heavily on it for rankings, and not validating after launch. There’s no technical knowledge required to fix any of these; it’s simply a matter of paying attention and doing what you would do with any other part of your site’s metadata. If you get these things right, your llms.txt is just what it should be: a simple, low-risk indicator that the best content is there, but doesn’t promise more than it can deliver.
FAQs
Q1. Do small businesses actually need an llms.txt file?
It isn’t mandatory, and no major search engine currently confirms that it’s used for rankings. But since it costs very little to set up correctly, most small-business sites can add one as a low-effort, low-risk addition to their broader SEO and AI visibility strategy.
Q2. How often should I update my llms.txt file to avoid mistakes?
A quarterly review works well for most SMB websites, though you should also update it immediately after launching new pages, retiring old ones, or changing pricing and service offerings.
Q3. Can a poorly formatted llms.txt file hurt my website’s SEO?
It won’t directly damage your Google rankings, but a broken or outdated file can mislead AI tools that do read it and signal a lack of upkeep, which is worth avoiding even if the direct SEO impact is minimal.