2026-08-03 · Jack Stovell

How to add llms.txt to a WordPress site

Put a plain-text file named llms.txt in your WordPress site's root directory — the same folder that holds wp-config.php — and it is served at yourdomain.com/llms.txt immediately. Any hosting file manager or SFTP client can do it. No plugin, no code, no theme changes.

Where does llms.txt go in WordPress?

In the web root: the directory where WordPress itself is installed, alongside wp-config.php, wp-admin and wp-content. Your web server hands out static files from this folder before WordPress routing ever runs, so nothing about your theme, permalink settings or plugins can interfere with the file once it is there.

To get there, use whichever file access your host provides — the cPanel or Plesk file manager, your hosting dashboard's file browser, or SFTP with any client. Create a new file named exactly llms.txt (lower case, .txt not .md) and paste in something like this:

# Jane Smith — Freelance Data Engineer

> Independent data engineer in Bristol, UK. I build reporting
> pipelines for mid-size retailers and write about the trade.

## Key pages

- [About](https://example.com/about): who I am, experience, how I work
- [Services](https://example.com/services): what I take on, with typical engagements
- [Writing](https://example.com/blog): selected posts on data pipelines
- [Contact](https://example.com/contact): email and booking link

The format is plain markdown: an H1 with your name or business, a short blockquote summary, then your most important URLs with one line of context each. Point it at the pages that answer "who is this and what do they do" — the about page, your best posts, contact. Curation is the whole point: a handful of pages that matter, not your archive. For what to write and why, see our full llms.txt guide.

One thing to know before you spend long on it: llms.txt is a proposal, not a standard. Crawlers do request the file — we see the hits in our own server logs — but no major AI vendor documents using it to build answers. The cost is one text file, which is why we ship it anyway.

Do you need a plugin?

No. A static file needs no plugin, and this is the rare WordPress job where the no-plugin route is also the easy route. Several SEO plugins now offer to generate an llms.txt for you, and they work — but generated files tend to list everything, and an automatic dump of your archive is exactly what the format is not for. A hand-written file that names the pages that matter, in your own words, is better and needs no dependency kept updated.

The plugin route earns its keep in one situation: your host gives you no file access at all, which some managed WordPress plans don't. Then a plugin that writes the file for you is a fair fallback. If you have SFTP or a file manager, skip it.

How do you check it worked?

Fetch it the way a crawler does:

curl -i https://yourdomain.com/llms.txt

You want HTTP 200, a text content type, and your own words in the body. The failure mode to watch for is a 200 that returns your theme's styled 404 page as HTML — that means the file is not in the folder the server actually serves from, which is common when WordPress lives in a subdirectory but the site is served from the domain root. Put the file where the domain root points and test again.

Also worth a glance: your robots.txt. The file being present does nothing if your robots rules turn AI crawlers away at the door — the user agents to check are listed here. Our free AI visibility checker tests both at once, along with identity markup and a JavaScript-shell check, and i.hilyt.it/jack/llm.txt is a live example of the format — the per-person card every hilyt profile gets automatically.

What this won't do: putting the file up does not earn citations by itself. It removes one reason for AI systems to skip you; whether you actually get cited comes down to retrieval, ranking and model behaviour.

See a live llm.txt card

Related guides

All guides · Free AI visibility checker · hilyt.it