llms.txt for Shopify: A Practical Guide

AI shopping agents — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity — read your store before they recommend it. The first thing many of them look for is a short file called llms.txt at the root of your domain. It's the agent-era equivalent of robots.txt: a plain-text summary that tells a language model what your site is, what matters, and where to find the canonical sources.

For Shopify merchants getting ready for agentic commerce, adding one takes about ten minutes and helps every AI crawler that hits your store from now on.

What is llms.txt?

llms.txt is an emerging convention (proposed by Jeremy Howard in 2024) for a Markdown file served at /llms.txt. It gives LLM-based agents a curated, machine-readable summary of your site so they don't have to scrape and guess. A good file answers three questions in under a page: what is this site, what does it sell, and where are the authoritative pages.

Why it matters for Shopify

Agents have a token budget. Faced with a 200-product store and no map, they sample pages, miss your hero collection, and confidently recommend a discontinued SKU. With llms.txt pointing at your top collections, your policies, and your sitemap, the agent indexes the right pages on the first pass — and your store shows up correctly when a shopper asks for "the best wool coat under $300."

The file format

It's just Markdown. A minimal Shopify version looks like this:

# Acme Outdoors

> Acme Outdoors sells durable wool outerwear for cold-weather hiking, shipping from Portland, Oregon.

## Shop
- [All products](https://acme.com/collections/all): Full catalog with current pricing and stock.
- [Men's outerwear](https://acme.com/collections/mens-outerwear): Jackets, coats, vests.
- [Women's outerwear](https://acme.com/collections/womens-outerwear): Jackets, coats, vests.

## Policies
- [Shipping](https://acme.com/policies/shipping-policy): Free US shipping over $75; 3–5 day delivery.
- [Returns](https://acme.com/policies/refund-policy): 60-day returns, free for US orders.

## Sitemap
- [sitemap.xml](https://acme.com/sitemap.xml)

One H1 with your store name, a single-sentence summary in a blockquote, then H2 sections pointing at the URLs you most want indexed. Keep it under ~50 lines.

How to add it to Shopify

Shopify doesn't expose /llms.txt as a built-in file, so you have two options:

Option 1: Theme template (recommended)

1. In your Shopify admin, go to Online Store → Themes → Edit code.
2. Under Templates, click Add a new template.
3. Choose template type page, name it llms, format liquid.
4. Paste your Markdown into the template, wrapped in a single Liquid tag that strips the layout.
5. Create a page in Online Store → Pages with the handle llms-txt and assign it the new template.
6. Add a URL redirect from /llms.txt to /pages/llms-txt under Online Store → Navigation → URL Redirects.

Option 2: App or proxy

If your store sits behind a reverse proxy (Cloudflare, Vercel) you can serve /llms.txt as a static file from there and bypass Shopify entirely. This is the cleanest setup if you already have that layer.

What to put in it

• Your hero collections. The 3–5 pages a human would land on first.
• Your policies. Shipping, returns, terms — in plain text, not behind JS.
• Your sitemap. So agents can find every product without crawling navigation.
• What you don't sell. One line saving the agent from wrong recommendations ("We don't ship outside North America.").

Verifying it works

Once it's live, open https://yourstore.com/llms.txt in a fresh browser tab. You should see your Markdown rendered as plain text — no theme chrome, no HTML wrapper. Then ask ChatGPT or Claude "what does yourstore.com sell?" If the answer reflects what you wrote in the file, the agent picked it up.

Where this fits in your Daeri score

llms.txt is a Discoverability fix — the dimension of your Agent-Readiness Score that measures whether an agent can find and understand your store in the first place. Most Shopify stores ship without one and lose 10–15 points here. Adding the file is the fastest single win we see in audits.