AI Readiness
llms.txt availability
llms.txt availability is one of the public readiness signals included in isitready.dev reports.
What we check
How the scan observes this signal.
The scanner fetches /llms.txt and /llms-full.txt from the canonical origin, validates that they respond with a 2xx status and a plain-text content type, and then cross-references the URLs inside them against robots.txt, the sitemap, and the HTML <link> headers on the homepage.
Why it matters
Why this shows up on the report card.
Agent-readable summaries help assistants understand product scope, docs, and preferred links before they crawl expensive pages.
Sample evidence
What a passing row looks like.
- GET /llms.txt
200 OK · text/plain · 2.1 KB- GET /llms-full.txt
200 OK · text/plain · 9.6 KB- Referenced from robots.txt
yes- Referenced from Link header
rel="describedby"
How to improve
Steps in the remediation brief.
Publish a concise /llms.txt at the root of your canonical origin listing your most important docs, tools, and policy pages.
Publish /llms-full.txt with per-link summaries for assistants that want longer context, and keep the URLs in sync with the short index.
Reference the files from robots.txt, sitemap.xml, and an HTTP Link: <…/llms.txt>; rel="describedby" header so discovery paths agree.
Re-run the scan and confirm the llms.txt evidence row now reports a passing status with the file size and hit count it observed.
Common questions
Questions people ask about this check.
- What is llms.txt and why does isitready.dev check for it?
- llms.txt is a small plain-text file at the root of a site that lists the URLs AI assistants should inspect first — docs, tools, policies, and canonical content. isitready.dev fetches it to confirm that agent-readable discovery is available and that its links agree with robots.txt and the sitemap.
- Where should llms.txt live?
- At the root of your canonical public origin — for example, https://example.com/llms.txt. It should return a 200 status with a text/plain content type and be listed from robots.txt and an HTTP Link header so assistants can find it without guessing.
- Do I need both /llms.txt and /llms-full.txt?
- No — /llms.txt is the minimum. /llms-full.txt is an optional long-form variant with per-link summaries. If you ship both, keep the URL set in sync so assistants that fetch either file see the same preferred surfaces.