Does your app have a real llms.txt, or just a 404?
llms.txt is a plain-text file at your domain root that gives AI assistants and crawlers a clean summary of what your product does and which pages are worth reading. Most SaaS sites either don't have one, or ran it through a generic generator that produced boilerplate no assistant will actually use.
How to tell if this is happening to you
- Visiting yourapp.com/llms.txt returns a 404
- The file exists but was auto-generated with placeholder text that doesn't describe your actual product
- It lists every route on the site instead of the handful that actually matter to a visitor or an AI assistant
- It hasn't been updated since launch and no longer reflects pricing, features, or pages that changed
- There's no mention of what the product does, who it's for, or a summary an assistant could actually quote
Why most llms.txt generators fall short
A generic generator can create the file format correctly, but it doesn't know your product. Without a real, product-specific summary, the file is just an empty shell with the right filename — which defeats the point.
AI builders like Lovable, Bolt, and v0 don't add this by default because it's not part of the visible product experience. Nothing in the UI breaks if it's missing, so it's easy to launch without ever adding one.
The file is most useful when it reads like a short, honest brief: what the product does, who it's for, and which two or three pages actually matter — not a dump of every URL on the site.
What actually fixes it
- 1. Create a plain-text file at /llms.txt (not JSON, not HTML) describing your product in two or three sentences
- 2. List your audience and the core problem the product solves in plain language
- 3. Link only the handful of pages that actually matter — pricing, docs, key feature pages — not every route on the site
- 4. Keep it current: update it whenever pricing, positioning, or your key pages change
- 5. Verify it's actually being served at the production domain, not just in local development
Copy-paste this into Cursor, Claude, or v0 to ship the fix:
You are creating a real, product-specific llms.txt file for this app. 1. Create public/llms.txt as a plain-text file (not JSON or HTML) 2. Write a two-to-three sentence summary of what this specific product does and who it's for 3. Link only the 3-5 pages that actually matter (pricing, docs, key feature pages) 4. Do not use placeholder or generic boilerplate text Ship the diff and confirm with "curl -s https://yourapp.com/llms.txt".
curl -s https://yourapp.com/llms.txt
This is one of 43 checks in a Launch Readiness Audit.
Findable is one pillar. Search visibility, functionality, measurement, launch readiness, and the rest of trust and compliance are the other five — and most AI-built apps have gaps in more than one.