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What should a local business put in its llms.txt file?
Answered by Ryan, RankNext strategist · Updated July 2, 2026
The short answer
A curated map, not a sitemap dump: one paragraph saying who you are and who you serve; your services and cities in plain lists; pricing posture if you publish it; and links to the handful of pages that answer real questions. Think 'briefing document for an engine deciding whether to recommend you.'
Contents that earn their place
Lead with the identity paragraph: trade, service area, what makes you the safe recommendation (licensing, years in business, warranties — factual, not slogans). Then structured lists: services (the real ones, worded how customers ask), cities covered, hours. Then the page map: your emergency page, your top service pages, your reviews page — each with a one-line description of what it answers.
Skip the marketing fluff. An engine reading llms.txt is deciding what to cite; give it verifiable facts and the URLs that back them. If you publish pricing, include the posture — engines increasingly quote cost context and it filters mismatched leads.
Make it once, keep it honest
The file lives at yoursite.com/llms.txt as plain text. The real discipline is freshness: when services or cities change, llms.txt changes, or it quietly lies to every engine that reads it. Regenerating it whenever the site meaningfully changes is the simplest policy.
Our free generator builds a correct one from a short form — and practicing what we preach, our own llms.txt is generated from our live site data on every deploy, so it can't drift. Yours shouldn't either.
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llms.txt Generator
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