In the high-stakes poker game of Modern SEO, llms.txt is the competitor’s accidental “tell.”

For two decades, we have scraped sitemaps to understand a competitor’s scale. We have scraped RSS feeds to understand their publishing velocity. But sitemaps are noisy—they contain every tag page, every archive, every piece of legacy drift. They tell you what exists, but they don’t tell you what matters.

The llms.txt file is different. It is a curated, high-stakes declaration of what a website owner believes is their most valuable information. By defining this file, they are explicitly telling OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google: “If you only read 50 pages on my site to answer a user’s question, read these.”