2 July 2026 10:27 amIf there is a standout winner for the ‘Most Overused Acronym in 2025 / 2026’ award it must be ‘AI’. The use of AI has now infiltrated every aspect of our online life in one way or another. It should be no surprise that the way your website uses and interacts with AI is now an important consideration.
AI Search
In recent years every website owner has had to gain at least some appreciation of regular Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Now though, a great many searches are processed by AI. This can be either natively (in AI applications like ChatGPT and Claude) or within search sites like Google’s AI search that now resides at the top of every Google search results page.
So how do AIs find the information used in their output? The answer, at least in part, lies in two new files your website needs. If you're groaning at the thought of yet more website work, sorry!
LLMS.TXT
This file, which lives in the root folder of your website, is a code based ‘map’ of your site, detailing the main pages and their respective URLs. It's written purely for AIs and formatted using a format called ‘Markdown’.
Now you might be thinking “don't I already have a sitemap.xml file that does this?”. A perfectly valid thought and yes, you probably do. However, AIs want the information to be delivered differently and that is the job of the LLMS.TXT file.
If you want to check whether you have this file on your website already, simply go to yourdomain.com/llms.txt in a web browser and see what happens. If you get a 404 error, then you don't have one yet but should look to add one ASAP!
Structured Data (Organisation Schema)
If LLMS.TXT is the map, structured data is the label on the box. This is a small block of code, usually added to your homepage, that describes your company in a format machines can read without guessing: your name, address, phone number, social media profiles, and key facts like the year you were founded.
It's not new, and you may already have some of it if you've done any local SEO work. But it's taken on fresh importance now that AI tools are increasingly the ones answering questions about who you are and what you do. The clearer and more consistent this information is, the less chance an AI has to get something wrong or invent a detail that doesn't exist.
You can check whether a page has this in place using Google's Rich Results Test — just enter your homepage URL and see what, if anything, it picks up.
A quick note for the technically curious: you may come across a file called AGENTS.MD while researching this topic. Despite the similar-sounding name, it's unrelated to any of the above — it's a file used by software developers to give instructions to AI coding assistants (like Cursor or GitHub Copilot) working inside a codebase. Nothing to do with your company's public-facing information, so don't be tempted to add one to your website root expecting it to help with AI search.
I Don't Have These – HELP!
If you find your site doesn't have these resources, or you are unsure, then please do get in touch. We supply these as standard for all our website projects and can usually add them for other websites too.
