Your hotel is paying for an AI file that nothing reads
Vendors sell hotels an llms.txt file for up to thousands a year. No major AI engine reads it — ChatGPT included
by Markus Busch
Start with the invoice. In the last eighteen months a small industry has grown up around a single text file. Visito gives hotels a free llms.txt generator. INNsight bundles the file into an AI-SEO package. LuxDirect calls publishing one "one of the highest-leverage fixes" for a luxury hotel's AI visibility. Some charge nothing; some charge into the thousands a year (vendor and agency figures, not audited). The pitch never changes: drop this file at the root of your domain and the AI engines will find you.
They won't — and the engines have said so out loud. Google's John Mueller, on the Search Off the Record podcast, said he'd spoken to one of the file's own authors: llms.txt was never meant to make a site discoverable. Gary Illyes said the same a year ago — not supported, not planned. Google's AI guidance, updated in June, is blunt: "You don't need to create… AI text files, markup, or Markdown to appear in Google Search… Google Search itself doesn't use them." And when researchers checked the server logs, the AI crawlers were requesting the file a fraction of a percent of the time.
Google speaks only for Google — so check the rest. The vendors sell ChatGPT, not Google Search. OpenAI has never said its crawlers parse llms.txt or treat it as anything special. Anthropic and Perplexity haven't confirmed reading it either — and publishing their own file, for their own documentation, is not the same as reading yours. No major AI company has adopted the format. The tools that do read it — agent frameworks, retrieval pipelines, the plumbing behind coding assistants — are not what names a hotel when a guest asks where to stay.
It started as a real tool, for a different job. llms.txt is not a grift. Jeremy Howard, a serious AI researcher, proposed it in September 2024 to solve a narrow problem: when a model is already reading your site, hand it a clean summary so it doesn't choke on menus, ads, and scripts. It caught on exactly where that problem lives — developer documentation. Stripe and Cloudflare publish one so coding assistants can read their software manuals. That is the file doing its job. A hotel is not a software manual, and a guest looking for a room is not a robot reading your code.
A file can't vouch for itself. Mueller put his finger on the deeper reason. An llms.txt is the owner describing their own site — I have the best hotel in town, here are the pages everyone should see. A machine can't tell one such boast from the next, so by design it ignores them all. The comparison he reached for is one every veteran will feel in the stomach: the keywords meta tag, the 1990s file agencies sold as SEO until the search engines admitted they'd stopped reading it. The racket is thirty years old. Only the file name is new.
For a hotel, the file misses twice. Ask ChatGPT or Gemini for somewhere to stay, and the model doesn't open your website at all. It builds the answer from structured place data — your Google Business Profile, Maps, your reviews, TripAdvisor, the OTAs. That is where your hotel is known or invisible. A page where you describe yourself changes nothing in a process built on what everyone else says about you.
Now the trade, in plain terms. The money buys a file that nothing reads, while the things that actually decide whether an AI names your hotel — your Business Profile, your reviews, your standing on the sites the model trusts — sit untouched. An AI recommends the hotel it already knows. And it learns what it knows from everyone except you.
What to do Monday. Pull up your agency invoice and look for an llms.txt line. If it's there, move that money to your Google Business Profile and your reviews on TripAdvisor and the OTAs. The file takes two hours to make and no one reads it. The rest — where guests actually find you — is where the budget belonged all along.
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