This is a cross-post from lab451.org/blog. I've been working on tooling for the llms.txt standard for a few months and the most common question I get is "which file do I actually need." Here's the answer at length.
They sound nearly identical. They live next to each other at the root of your site. They serve the same broad audience. But they do fundamentally different jobs — and knowing which one to ship (or whether to ship both) is the difference between AI models understanding your site and AI models actually answering questions about it.
On this page
The TL;DR
Two files, two jobs
