As we build the Agentic Web, a confusing alphabet soup of standards is emerging. Three files, in particular, are vying for the attention of modern SEOs: llms.txt, cats.txt, and the new WebMCP protocol.

They often get confused, but they serve three distinct purposes in the lifecycle of an AI interaction. Think of them as Context, Contract, and Capability.

1. LLMS.TXT: The Context (What to Know)

• Role: Documentation for Robots.
• Location: Root directory (/llms.txt).
• Audience: Training crawlers and RAG agents.

llms.txt is essentially a Markdown file that strips away the HTML “cruft” of your website. It provides a clean, token-efficient summary of your content. It answers the question: “What information does this website hold?”

In the hierarchy of web crawlers, there is Googlebot, there is Bingbot, and then there is OpenClaw. While traditional search engine bots are polite librarians cataloging books, OpenClaw is a voracious scholar tearing pages out to build a new compendium.

OpenClaw is an Autonomous Research Agent. It doesn’t just index URLs; it traverses the web to synthesize knowledge graphs. If your site blocks OpenClaw, you aren’t just missing from a search engine results page; you are missing from the collective intelligence of the Agentic Web.

For thirty years, robots.txt has been the “Keep Out” sign of the internet. It was a simple binary instruction: “Crawler A, you may enter. Crawler B, you are forbidden.” This worked perfectly when the goal of a crawler was simply to index content—to point users back to your site.

But in the Generative AI era, the goal has shifted. Crawlers don’t just index; they ingest. They consume your content to train models that may eventually replace you.