Terms of Trade · Edition 4: The AI pitch, and Barking Cat’s own terms
llms.txt
Definition
A proposed plain-text file at the root of a website, alongside robots.txt, giving AI systems a curated summary in a few hundred words of what the business is, who it is for and where its important pages are. An emerging convention rather than an adopted standard, with no guarantee that any provider reads it, and cheap enough that not having one is a decision.
Field note
llms.txt is a tiny file on the website welcoming our AI overlords.
Board question
Do we have one, what does it say we are, and does it match what the board thinks we are?
Applied through
The Agentic lens of the AI Diagnostic; the Commercial Experience Index reads its presence within the AI Readiness measure, and Edition Two found sixteen of twenty Premier League club shops returning a 404 at that address (method documented in the edition).
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