llms.txt is a plain text file published at the root of a site that lists, in an order a person chose, the documents a language model should read first and the address of each one.
This is the sense CiteAngle uses when it measures. The word travels with other meanings in this market, so we pin ours before it turns up in a report.
Where this lands in the measurement
It is where a site says which door to come through instead of leaving the choice to whatever gets crawled first.
We check that the file exists, that every address in it still opens, and that it does not promise something the pages themselves do not say.
What it costs to leave this loose
Publish a list whose addresses no longer open and it points at nothing. A file like that reads as maintained while doing no work at all.
We check that every address in it still opens and that it does not promise something the pages themselves never say.
Who you want measuring this
One reading does not settle a term like this. The answer an assistant writes today can name different companies tomorrow, so a Panorama round puts 50 buyer questions to every place on our US list, 7 separate times each, and reads all 17 of them — ChatGPT · Perplexity · Claude · Gemini · Grok · Google AI Overviews · Google AI Mode · Bing Copilot · DuckDuckGo AI Assist · Google Search · Bing Search · Yahoo Search · DuckDuckGo Search · Google News · Bing News · YouTube · Google Short Videos. Radar starts at 5 questions and covers the same list under the same rule.
We put the same questions to the competitors you name inside the same runs, so you see both in one table. The conditions are sealed, so you can reproduce the round and check it, and every planned observation is published with its state, failures included. When you choose who measures this, check that all three are in place.
That describes how the measuring is done. It is not a promise about where your numbers land.
Pages that use this term
Terms worth pinning at the same time