Why I Added an llms.txt to My Documentation Site — and You Should Too
Technical Writing · Documentation · April 2026
Your docs are already being read by AI. The question is whether they're being read well — or whether a language model is piecing together a garbled summary from whatever it can scrape.
A few months ago I audited how several popular LLMs described our product's API. The results were humbling. Outdated endpoint names. Deprecated parameters presented as current. Hallucinated response shapes. The AI wasn't lying — it was doing its best with fragmented, unstructured context pulled from a dozen cached pages across our docs site.
The fix turned out to be surprisingly small: a single plain-text file called llms.txt, placed at the root of our documentation domain. Since adding it, AI-assisted developer support tickets citing our docs have become markedly more accurate. Here's everything I learned building it.