Last updated July 1, 2025 by Patrick Coombe
JSONLD.com recently jumped on the LLM bandwagon and with that we noticed our SEO plugin Yoast added llms.txt support, that is cool! Being that the llms.txt file can loosely be considered “structured data” we feel like it fits the topic of our blog.
I did a little digging into how Yoast does this and this is what I came up with.
What is the purpose of LLMs.txt file in general
In short, and in my opinion, the purpose of the LLMs.txt file is to highlight the most important content. A robots.txt file will generally list all content on a website, an LLMs.txt file will highlight the most important, unique content.
How Yoast Generates LLMS.txt file
Content Selection Algorithm: Yoast SEO includes the 5 latest updated posts/pages/custom post types in the llms.txt file (posts are only included if they have been published in the last 12 months) and includes the 5 categories/tags with the most content pieces attached to them. I think that is pretty cool.
Update Schedule: This file will be updated weekly by a scheduled action and the file is generated and refreshed weekly, no coding or manual work needed.
Smart Content Filtering
Yoast respects your existing SEO settings – it only includes content that’s set to appear in search results and excludes content marked as noindex. Custom post types and taxonomies are included based on your Search Appearance settings.
Conflict Handling
If you already have a manual llms.txt file, Yoast won’t overwrite it, giving you the option to use either the automated generation or maintain your own custom version.
Suggestion to Yoast
Yoast already has a “cornerstone content” feature which has been growing on me in recent years. Cornerstone content is basically “important content” – why not include cornerstone content in the llms.txt file?
I’d also like to maybe see inclusion in Yoast’s bulk editor to check which pages I want to include. For many people, contact & about info is a necessary part of llms.txt.
The system is designed to be completely hands-off once enabled, automatically curating your most relevant and recent content for AI tools without any ongoing maintenance required.
My opinion of our LLMs.txt file
Overall I am not happy with our llms.txt file. There are only 5 URIs and if it were me I would include at least our top 15 URLs. JSONLD.com is a very popular site and sometimes gets 100’s of visitors per day to many different pages.
I think if we are going to continue to use LLMs.txt as a standard, I will roll my own in the future.
Our llms.txt file includes our most recent post and 3 of our most popular posts. This is partially my fault for (I guess) not updating the posts as regularly as I should…but some posts just don’t need updating all that often, especially on a site like this.
Here is our LLMs.txt file:
And a direct link to our llms.txt here also.
Anyway, I think it is cool Yoast through their hat in the ring but I’m underwhelmed overall.
If you really “believe in” llms.txt you should probably make your own.
