llms.txt

Whether major assistants consume it is still genuinely unsettled. What is settled is adoption: we checked 58 well-known DTC brands and 73% of the reachable ones already publish one — but 70% of those did not write it, because Shopify generates a templated file automatically. Publishing one is therefore table stakes rather than an edge.

That moves the useful question from whether to have one to whether the default describes you. A generated 4.3KB file describes a generic store; it does not know which products matter, which questions your buyers ask, or what separates you from the twenty-two other brands publishing a near-identical document.

The one rule that decides whether it is worth anything: generate it, do not hand-write it. A hand-maintained index rots within two deploys, and a stale index is worse than none because it confidently points at pages that have moved.

There is now evidence for that rule beyond staleness. Among the stores we found accepting an agent checkout, several publish a hand-authored file that never names the endpoints their own store answers on — so the file a careful team wrote hides a capability the generated one announces. Read what is at that path before replacing it.