Two small text files do a lot of GEO damage when they are wrong.
robots.txt
Search and AI crawlers honour robots.txt. If you Disallow: / for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot or Google-Extended, those systems are being told not to fetch you. That is a choice — sometimes correct for staging — and a common production accident.
A GEO-friendly policy typically:
- Allows
/for*except/adminand/api - Explicitly allows the major AI user agents
- Points at your sitemap
Optimizer360.ai’s public robots policy is generated from a template that names GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, Bingbot, Applebot-Extended and others.
Confirm current official agent names in each vendor’s documentation before you copy a list from a blog.
llms.txt
llms.txt is a proposed convention: a Markdown file at /llms.txt that tells language models what the site is, which pages matter, and where the longer extract lives (/llms-full.txt). It is not an official Google ranking factor. It is a courtesy map.
A useful llms.txt is short, factual, and updated when you publish. It should not invent metrics. Ours lists who we are, the engines we cover, key URLs, and published articles.
ai.txt
Some sites add /ai.txt as a human-readable crawl policy that points at llms.txt, the sitemap and a contact address. It complements robots.txt; it does not replace it.
What not to do
Do not stuff llms.txt with keyword lists. Do not claim citation rates. Do not allow bots on staging and then forget to allow them in production — or the reverse.