Understanding llms.txt, AI Guidance Pages, and Updates to robots.txt:
Why They’re Needed and How They Fit Together
As artificial intelligence continues to reshape how information is discovered, indexed, and reused, website owners are facing new challenges.
Traditional web crawling and modern AI-driven content consumption behave very differently, meaning the old rules no longer cover all the scenarios.
Search engines once carried the primary responsibility for indexing content, ranking pages, and directing users to relevant results. However, today large language models (LLMs) are capable of reading, summarising, and even repurposing site content in ways that go far beyond the expectations set when robots.txt was first introduced.
This shift has sparked a growing need for mechanisms that clearly articulate how website content may be accessed and used by AI agents. Three connected tools are emerging to help address this: the familiar robots.txt file, the newer and more AI-specific llms.txt file, and a human-readable AI guidance page. These elements together provide clarity, transparency, and control in a landscape where AI-driven crawling is rapidly becoming the norm.
Why robots.txt Alone Is No Longer Enough
Historically, robots.txt has been used to tell search engine crawlers which parts of a website they may or may not access. Instructions such as Disallow: and Allow: became the standard way for site owners to manage visibility and control crawler load.
However, modern AI crawlers often behave quite differently from traditional bots. They may:
- Access content not for indexing but for training or model improvement.
- Perform broad, site-wide scraping intended to build datasets.
- Use patterns of crawling that weren’t anticipated by the original robots.txt conventions.
Because the original robots.txt specification predates LLMs by decades, it offers no explicit rules around training usage, data retention, or content licensing. While many AI agents still respect robots.txt, it does not provide the granularity required to distinguish between search indexing and AI training—two very different uses of content.
For this reason, many organisations have begun updating their robots.txt files with AI-specific instructions, often naming particular bots or adding clearer disallow directives. These adjustments do not formally extend the standard, but they help signal site owners’ intentions and provide a first level of control.
Introducing llms.txt: A Dedicated Space for AI Permissions
The emergence of llms.txt represents a natural evolution in machine-readable web governance. Placed at the root of your domain, this new file is intended to offer a dedicated, structured set of instructions specifically for LLMs and AI crawlers.
A typical llms.txt file might:
- List AI agents (such as “GPTBot” or “ClaudeBot”) and specify whether they may access content.
- Differentiate between viewing and training permissions.
- Provide links to licensing terms or usage policies.
- Declare allowed and disallowed datasets or retrieval patterns.
While llms.txt is not yet a formal standard, it is rapidly being adopted as a best practice across the industry. It acts as the AI-era equivalent of robots.txt, providing a clean, purpose-built space for communicating expectations to AI systems.
Crucially, llms.txt also supports greater flexibility. Because it’s an emerging convention, it can evolve quickly to reflect the needs of content creators, publishers, educators, and platforms—i.e. groups whose work may be sensitive to how AI models use their data.
The Role of an AI Guidance Page
Alongside these machine-readable files sits the AI guidance page: a human-readable document that explains your site’s AI usage policies in clear, accessible terms.
An AI guidance page typically includes:
- A summary of your site’s stance on AI crawling and training.
- Stating priority content landing pages along with an explanation – content seen as important to your business.
- Explanations of any restrictions or licensing terms.
- Links to your robots.txt and llms.txt files.
- Contact information for queries or permissions.
- Notes on how you expect third parties to handle your content.
This page helps ensure there is no ambiguity. While robots.txt and llms.txt speak to machines, the AI guidance page speaks to people—developers, researchers, AI partners, and users who want to understand how your content may be used.
For organisations concerned about intellectual property, copyright, or brand integrity, this transparency provides an essential layer of protection. For organisations that welcome AI-related usage, it serves as a simple way to communicate permissions and foster collaboration.
How the Three Components Fit Together
These three tools form a coherent ecosystem:
- robots.txt remains the first point of contact for all crawlers, including AI agents that still respect traditional rules.
- llms.txt offers a more detailed, AI-specific set of permissions—addressing gaps that robots.txt cannot fill.
- The AI guidance page provides a human-friendly interpretation of your policies, ensuring clarity and accountability.
Together, they offer website owners a modern framework for managing AI interaction across both technical and legal dimensions. As LLMs continue to expand their role in search, content understanding, and knowledge retrieval, these tools help ensure the balance between innovation and responsible content use remains clear, fair, and transparent.
Exciting time are ahead. Time to embrace it!
For further information or if you need assistance for your business, please contact us either on email enquiries@figadigital.com or call us on, Freephone, 0800 802 1968.
