The llms.txt file
The llms.txt file is a summary of your website intended for artificial intelligence assistants. It is published in the root directory of your website and lists the title and description of each of your pages. The goal is to help these tools quickly understand what your website is about, without having to crawl through all of your pages.
This file follows the public standard described on llmstxt.org. It supplements the sitemap and the robots.txt file, without replacing them: those files are still intended for traditional search engines.
Enable the file
- Open the project settings, under the Sitemap / htaccess / robots.txt / 404 Error section.
- Scroll down to the llms.txt section and check the box next to “Enable the llms.txt file.”
- If you wish, enter a title and a summary.
- Publish your site.
By default, the title uses your site’s name, and the summary uses the description from your homepage. The “Additional Content” field lets you insert your own text in Markdown format, which will appear before the list of pages.
Accents are displayed incorrectly
If you open your published llms.txt file in a browser and see “Gaëlle” instead of “Gaëlle,” or “Carrières” instead of “Carrières,” your file is not corrupted. This is a display issue, not a defect in the file itself.
WebAcappella always writes this file in UTF-8, the standard web encoding, and the accents remain intact. However, some web hosts do not specify the encoding when they send a .txt file to the visitor. The browser then has to guess the encoding, and it gets it wrong. Your HTML pages are not affected because they declare their encoding within the document itself, which a text file cannot do.
To fix this, enable the .htaccess file in the same section of the project settings, then add these three lines to the edit field and republish your site:
<IfModule mod_mime.c>
AddCharset UTF-8 .txt
</IfModule>This instruction simply tells your host to specify UTF-8 encoding for .txt files. It also benefits your robots.txt file.
Does this affect SEO?
The impact is limited. Depending on the tool reading the file, accents may or may not be interpreted correctly, and this cannot be controlled from your site. Most importantly, your pages already contain the same titles and descriptions as the llms.txt file, and they are served correctly: therefore, the essential information reaches search engines and AI assistants in any case.