Your site and AI search

BrightSite publishes an index of your published pages and posts so AI assistants can find and read your site.

People increasingly ask an AI assistant a question instead of typing it into a search engine. When they do, the assistant needs to be able to find and read your site to mention you in its answer.

BrightSite publishes a file at /llms.txt on your site to help with that. It is on for every site, and there is nothing to set up.

What the file is

It is a plain list of your published pages and blog posts, with their titles and addresses, in a simple format designed to be read by AI systems.

Think of it as a contents page for your website written for a machine. Instead of an AI assistant having to crawl around your site working out what is there, it reads one file and sees the whole picture immediately.

It is generated and kept up to date automatically. Publish a page and it appears. Unpublish one and it comes out. There is nothing for you to maintain.

Only published content is listed. Your drafts stay private, exactly as they do everywhere else.

Markdown versions of your pages

Alongside the index, every public page on your site can also be served as plain markdown. An AI assistant that asks for the markdown version gets your words without the navigation, styling and scripts wrapped around them, which makes your content easier to read accurately.

This happens automatically, and visitors using a browser always get the normal page.

This is about AI reading your site

Worth being clear on, because the two get mixed up.

  • This page is about AI assistants reading your published website, so that when someone asks one of them a question your business could answer, it can find you.
  • AI tools inside BrightSite are something else entirely. Those help you write and edit your site.

The file described here does not involve any AI editing your content. It is a published index, no different in principle from a sitemap, just aimed at a different kind of reader.

Why it works in your favour

  • Being findable by AI assistants matters more each year, in the same way being findable by search engines did.
  • Everything listed is already public. The file makes existing public pages easier to find. It does not expose anything new.
  • It costs you nothing and needs no upkeep.
  • An assistant that can read your actual pages describes your business accurately. One that cannot is left guessing from whatever it finds elsewhere, which may be out of date or wrong.

It is also worth knowing that this is not the thing standing between your content and an AI system. Anything published on the public internet can be read by anything that visits it. The index simply makes your pages easier to read correctly. If you genuinely need something kept away from AI systems, not publishing it is the only reliable approach.

Helping AI describe you accurately

The file points at your pages. What those pages say is what gets read. So the same things that make your site good for people make it good here:

  • State plainly what you do, where you do it, and who you do it for.
  • Keep facts current, especially hours, prices and contact details.
  • Answer the questions customers actually ask, in plain language.
  • Fill in your structured data, which gives a machine your business facts directly.

There is no separate writing style for AI. Clear, accurate, current pages work for every kind of reader.

Last updated September 9, 2026