llms.txt & .md files: helpful for agents, not a GEO silver bullet

llms.txt is a curated markdown map of important pages for AI agents. It is not robots.txt, not a sitemap replacement, and — critically — major answer engines have not announced support for it as a ranking lever.

When it helps

If you want coding agents and tool-using LLMs to understand your API, docs, and workflows, a tight llms.txt (and optionally llms-full.txt) is a good bet. Anny's own AI instructions and docs follow that spirit.

When it's a distraction

Auto-generating llms.txt that dumps every SEO landing page, or cloning every article to .md duplicates, creates crawl and duplicate-content risk without proven GEO upside. Google's John Mueller has publicly compared it to the keywords meta tag: claims without confirmed consumers.

Verdict

• Agents and vibe-coding tools: yes, curate carefully
• ChatGPT/Perplexity traffic chasing: focus on sources, citations, and content quality instead