Google says LLMS.txt files won’t harm or help your search rankings

Google has updated its guide to optimizing for AI Search to clarify that having LLMS.txt files on your site won’t harm or help your search rankings in Google. Google also made it clear that Google Search does not use LLMS.txt files.

What Google wrote. I bolded the portion that is new, where Google wrote that Google Search does not use AI text files, markup or Markdown files.

• “You don’t need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, markup, or Markdown to appear in Google Search (including its generative AI capabilities), as Google Search itself doesn’t use them. Note that Google may discover, crawl, and index many kinds of files in addition to HTML on a website: this doesn’t mean that the file is treated in a special way.”

Google also added a new note that reads:

• “It’s completely fine if you decide to create and maintain LLMS.txt files (or other similar files) for other services or systems that use these files. Doing so won’t harm (nor help) your visibility or rankings in Google Search, as Google Search ignores them.”

Here is a screenshot of this section:

Dig deeper.

• Meet llms.txt, a proposed standard for AI website content crawling
• llms.txt isn’t robots.txt: It’s a treasure map for AI
• Does llms.txt matter? We tracked 10 sites to find out
• Google adds llms.txt check to Chrome Lighthouse

Why we care. There has been a lot of confusion around how Google Search handles LLMS.txt files and Markdown files, as well as other AI files. In short, Google Search may discover, crawl and index them but those files are not used in any special way for Google Search. It is not going to help you and it won’t hurt you for having them on your web site.