llms.txt for WordPress

Make your WordPress site discoverable by AI. Auto-generate and maintain llms.txt files, audit content for AI-search readiness, and serve per-page markdown variants - all from a single plugin with no external dependencies.

WordPress.org slug: llms-txt Requires: WordPress 6.0+ / PHP 8.1+ License: GPL v2 or later

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What is llms.txt?

llms.txt is an emerging web standard that provides a curated, markdown-formatted index of a website's most important content, designed for consumption by large language models (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews). Over 844,000 websites have adopted it, including Anthropic, Cloudflare, and Stripe.

WordPress sites need a way to generate and maintain this file automatically as content changes. That's what this plugin does.

Features

• Auto-generates llms.txt and llms-full.txt from your WordPress content
• Per-page .md endpoints - serve markdown variants of any post or page
• Setup wizard detects your site's content structure and proposes sections
• Curation UI - organize posts into named sections, override titles and descriptions, set sort order
• Search-and-select post picker - find content by title instead of hunting for post IDs
• 12-rule quality auditor - flags missing H1s, thin meta descriptions, duplicate titles, generic headings, boilerplate intros, stale content, and more
• robots.txt integration - adds llms.txt and missing sitemap references
• <link rel="llms"> injection in <head> for AI-bot discoverability
• WP Engine / Kinsta support - auto-detects managed hosts that block dynamic .txt serving and writes physical files instead
• Instant updates - section edits, settings changes, and post saves immediately regenerate the file

How it works

The plugin hooks into WordPress's content lifecycle:

1. On activation, a setup wizard scans your site and suggests an initial section structure
2. On every post save, the llms.txt cache is invalidated and the file is regenerated
3. Daily via cron, a full-site audit runs and both llms.txt and llms-full.txt are refreshed
4. On demand, you can edit sections, reorder content, and trigger manual regeneration

The description for each entry is resolved through a 10-priority chain: manual override, Yoast/RankMath/AIOSEO/SEOPress meta description, post excerpt, first sentence of content - each passing through quality gates that reject boilerplate, sales pitches, and too-short text.

Installation

From a zip (current method)

git clone https://github.com/xantus-ai/wp-llms-plugin.git
cd wp-llms-plugin
./build.sh

Upload the resulting llms-txt.zip via WP Admin → Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin.

Manual

1. Copy the plugin/ directory to wp-content/plugins/llms-txt/
2. Run composer install --no-dev inside the plugin directory
3. Activate through the WordPress Plugins menu

After activation

1. Go to llms.txt in the admin sidebar
2. Run the setup wizard
3. Visit /llms.txt on your site to verify

Repository layout

├── README.md                    # This file
├── generator-spec.md            # Algorithm specification for the generator/audit engines
├── build.sh                     # Builds uploadable llms-txt.zip
├── bump-version.sh              # Bumps version across all source-of-truth files
└── plugin/                      # WordPress plugin source
    ├── llms-txt.php             # Bootstrap + WP plugin header
    ├── composer.json            # PSR-4 autoload + league/html-to-markdown
    ├── readme.txt               # WordPress.org listing format
    ├── uninstall.php            # Cleanup on plugin delete
    ├── CHANGELOG.md             # Keep a Changelog format
    └── src/                     # PHP source (namespace WPLlms\)
        ├── Plugin.php           # Singleton, registers all hooks
        ├── Activator.php        # Activation: tables + options + cron + rewrite flush
        ├── Deactivator.php      # Deactivation cleanup
        ├── Admin/               # Admin menu + page renderers
        ├── Audit/               # 12 audit rules + orchestrator + persistence
        ├── Cron/                # Daily scheduler
        ├── Frontend/            # File serving, host detection, robots.txt, head injection
        ├── Generator/           # llms.txt/llms-full.txt/md generation engine
        ├── Setup/               # Wizard, site detector, section suggester
        └── Storage/             # DB schema, repositories, options wrapper

Note on naming: the user-facing plugin name is llms.txt for WordPress (WP.org slug llms-txt). The internal PHP namespace and identifier prefixes use WPLlms\ / WPLLMS_ / wpllms_ for historical reasons — these are not user-visible and are kept stable to avoid DB migrations.

Tech stack

Component	Choice
Language	PHP 8.1+
WordPress	6.0+
Autoloading	PSR-4 via Composer (with fallback)
Markdown conversion	league/html-to-markdown
Storage	Custom MySQL tables + wp_options
Admin UI	Server-rendered HTML + WordPress admin styles
Cron	WordPress wp-cron

Development

Build the zip

./build.sh

Runs composer install --no-dev, checks PHP syntax, and produces llms-txt.zip ready for WordPress upload.

Bump version

./bump-version.sh 0.2.0

Updates the version in plugin/llms-txt.php (header + constant), plugin/readme.txt, and plugin/CHANGELOG.md.

Lint

find plugin/src -name "*.php" -exec php -l {} \; 2>&1 | grep -v "No syntax errors"

Empty output means clean. The build script runs this automatically.

Conventions

Thing	Pattern
User-facing name	llms.txt for WordPress
WP.org slug	llms-txt
Text domain	llms-txt
PHP namespace	WPLlms\
Composer package	xantus/wpllms
Hook/option/transient prefix	wpllms_
DB table prefix	{$wpdb->prefix}wpllms_
Constants prefix	WPLLMS_
Filter names	wpllms_*

The audit rules

Rule	Severity	What it checks
missing_h1	Critical	No <h1> in page body
multiple_h1	Warning	More than one <h1>
generic_h1	Warning	H1 matches site tagline or appears on multiple pages
short_title	Warning	Title under 30 characters
long_title	Info	Title over 65 characters
thin_meta	Warning	Meta description missing or under 70 characters
duplicate_title	Warning	Title matches another post (exact or Levenshtein > 0.85)
thin_content	Warning	Page with under 300 words
boilerplate_intro	Warning	Opening text contains CTA phrases or matches site tagline
stale_content	Info	Not modified in over 24 months
no_internal_links	Info	Zero internal links in content
no_h2_headings	Info	Over 800 words with no H2 subheadings

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. Please open an issue first to discuss what you'd like to change.

The algorithm specification in generator-spec.md documents the contracts for the generator and audit engines - read it before modifying those components.

License

GPL v2 or later. See LICENSE.

Built by Xantus AI.