It's April 2025, the AI juggernaut are increasingly gaining momentum, and web designers are faced with a growing pile of questions;
- How do I keep my site relevant?
- How does AI affect my SEO strategy?
- Is my site getting "absorbed" by LLMs a good thing, or a bad thing?
- How do I grow my business and my site's effectiveness, now and in the future?
At this point we all collective sip lattes and stand in front of markerboards having long discussions about the future of the web, the role of AI, and what future websites will look like.
What we know
Here's what we know so far...
- Google and other search engines are making a hard push to deeply integrate AI into search. This means relevant, current, easily processed content is crucial if you want the AI response to favor your content and link back to it at the top of the results page
- LLMs are increasingly using website content, and linking back to it. When I ask Webflow-related questions, Sygnal's blog posts and courses are sometimes shared by ChatGPT, with links back to them. We want to encourage that, because it strengthens our brand, and traffic.
- In SEO, relevance matters- and in LLMs, even more so. Getting the right answer to the right question at the right time is challenging. If your site is complex and difficult for the LLM to navigate, you may not get the visibility you want.
- LLMs struggle with context window sizes and token limits. This means, in part, that when a user is looking to answer a question, clean, efficient content will be more likely to be processed and will benefit users more in finding their answer.
All of these things have given rise to a newly evolving standard known as LLMS.TXT.
What is LLMS.TXT?
Conceptually, you can think of llms.txt like a sitemap.xml for Large Language Models ( LLMs ), but instead of simply containing links, it also contains structured organized markdown content that the LLM can immediately use.
It's an abstract if your site's most important content.
Here's an example, Webflow's API documentation...
https://developers.webflow.com/llms.txt
When an LLM processes your LLMS.TXT, it can know your products, services, hours of operations, recent blog articles, and much more. In most cases, LLMS.TXT also acts as a directory to your most valuable content, with links to other markdown files that represent your individual products and service offerings.
For an LLM such as Claude, Gemini, or ChatGPT, this means a much more efficient way to find the content that you need. It starts with /llms.txt and then can continue to examine other files later as needed, in response to the user's prompt.
How does it benefit Website owners?
In truth, only time will tell.
In theory, these are some key benefits a good LLMS.TXT implementation can give you.
AI Optimization ( AIO ), the new SEO
Your website becomes much easier for AI's to process and make sense of. This makes it more likely that they'll find the right information quickly, and that likely means you content will simply be shown more.
Think of the early days of Google SEO, we're at that same stage. It's good to be in the SERPs.
Better User engagement
Today, LLMs are still largely used by a geekier crowd that favors technical experts and business professionals. However, it won't be long before LLMs are helping people with much more general tasks;
Help me plan my vacation and book my hotels & tours
Organize my grocery list, here's a photo of what's in the fridge, we need chili and salad for 4 people tonight
I want to find the right car, used is ok, low miles within 3 years new. Help me search dealerships and auction sites for the right car.
This means that the LLM will need not just general information, but specific information and agents to perform tasks with. Getting prices, ordering groceries, checking business hours.
The truth is, modern websites aren't ready for this.
But LLMS.TXT is one of the first steps here, specifically designed to connect websites to LLMs. The ones who embrace it first will be the ones that are most likely to get LLM attention, and visibility.
Better Integration Support
Have a content-heavy site, full of information, product catalogs, and support docs?
LLMS.TXT can be used by your directly integrated systems too. Power an AI chatbot on your website, or an internal customer sales and support desk, all from your site's content and CMS.
And done right, it's always perfectly current.
Do you need an LLMS.TXT?
It's an exciting future, but today LLMS.TXT is not useful for all sites.
It works best when;
- Your site is text-heavy, with valuable content
- All of that content is public, not paywalled or login-gated
- The content of your site is highly valuable in answering questions that an LLM user might have.
This is why currently, technical documentation is a popular use for LLMS.TXT.
As of April 2025, LLMS.TXT is probably not that useful for a photography portfolio, or a media site.
How to Setup Webflow + LLMS.TXT
Currently, Webflow's hosting platform doesn't offer any form of native LLMS.TXT or markdown generation support.
Here are two ways you can add it.
LLMS.TXT redirect ( Basic )
If you just want basic support, you can hand-create your LLMS.TXT markdown content, or use an LLM like ChatGPT to analyze your key pages and help you write one.
Once you have a text file ready with the markdown content you need, you can then;
- Upload it to your Webflow site's assets
- Create a redirect from /llms.txt to that asset file
- Republish your site
Unfortunately, this only solves for the LLMS.TXT file itself, and you must repeat this manual process any time you want to update it. The othe pages on your site will not have markdown extracts.
Reverse Proxy ( Advanced )
Another approach is to build a reverse proxy on top of your Webflow-hosted site, which can create markdown content you need dynamically from your Webflow site's HTML.
With this approach, you can deliver;
- An auto-generated, auto-updated
/llms.txtfile - An auto-generated markdown page for every page on the site. For example, your
/contactpage would be given an equivalent/contact.md.
While this is a substantial engineering effort, it's not much different from generating a dynamic sitemap.xml.
Sygnal is currently completing Hyperflow LLMS, which is our own solution to dynamic LLMS.TXT and markdown generation.
Our design provides full LLMS.TXT support for Webflow-hosted websites. All content of the LLMS.TXT and page-specific markdown extracts is directly controlled within the Webflow designer, so that you can fully customize it to your needs.
Once it's setup, it works automatically with no special user actions. Any changes to the site, like new blog entries, or a pricing list change, are automatically picked up and exposed in the llms.txt.
As a demonstration, you can see a fully-functioning prototype as a mirror of Sygnal's site.
https://llms.sygnal.com/llms.txt
Note the .md extension on all links in this file. If you copy-paste those into your browser, you can see the individual page markdown extracts as well.If you're interested in Sygnal's Hyperflow LLMS for your Webflow-hosted site, contact us to learn more.
The Future of LLMS.TXT
This is all conjecture, but I expect that the LLMS.TXT standard will evolve in a number of ways.
- Standardization and improved use of dates, to indicate current content more effectively.
- Key information structures, like;
- Important alerts
- Special offers and new products
- Expanded support for media such as photos and video
Querying Support
In my view, a key missing feature of LLMS.TXT is that an LLM has no clear way to query your site for specific information... such as to find a particuar product, or news about a specific topic.
Soon I anticipate the ability for the LLM to pass keywords in on a querystring and get a markdown search response efficiently.
Agents
Extending this further, it seems quite possible that a kind of Website-integrated MCP could exist that allows for specific LLM interactions, such as;
- Quote generation
- Shopping cart management and purchasing
- Account creation and management
Adoption into Web Publishing Platforms
Web publishing platforms like Webflow will likely add;
- Native support for LLMS.TXT ( or whatever it evolves into ).
- Support for MDX-like capabilities, components-as-markdown that allow the dynamic embedding of code blocks, tables, graphs and other content
Where is this all going?
Maybe we should call this... Web 4.0
The team at Sygnal has a very strong information engineering background. We anticipate that eventually most websites will shift towards an "agent" model. Sites will continue to perform their current functions like information-sharing and order capture, but under the direction of a LLM.
This makes things much easier for users. Rather than digging through Amazon.com, your AI's will know what you like, and recommend new products and the best, fastest, and cheapest suppliers to choose from.
For web designers, this will mean radical changes to the way we think of design and user interfaces, and a lot of websites will simply evaporate to the point that they have no user interface at all.
This is a long way away. Before then, there will be a complete rethink on UX's, protocols, directory services and search engines, and technical infrastructure.
For now, you're safe.
But the first steps have already been taken.
30 years ago, we designed websites exclusively for people.
15 years ago, we added search engines and SEO to the mix as a second critical "user" of our website content.
Today, it's time to think seriously about what AI and LLMs need to best represent our content to users and deliver the best results for our businesses.
