Have You Briefed AI On Your Business Yet?

My Google Ads dashboard has a standing suggestion: spend a few thousand more dollars and watch my leads go from a trickle to a slightly larger trickle. Most small business owners I know have some version of this story. Visibility is never finished. The platform always has one more lever to pull, one more budget increase to recommend, one more quiet reminder that being findable is expensive.

Then a few weeks ago, I came across a passing Instagram post about a simple file called llms.txt.

AI tools are already talking about our businesses. They are pulling from our websites, social media, third-party reviews, directories, and whatever else they can find, then turning that into answers. Where should I go for a unique group experience? What is a good date idea in Chicago? What can my team do together that is not another happy hour? An answer comes back whether you had anything to do with it or not. Sometimes they get the positioning right. Sometimes they miss the point entirely.

An llms.txt file is one emerging way to give AI tools a clearer brief. It is a plain text file that lives at your web address and explains who you are, what you offer, who you serve, and what kinds of questions your business is a strong answer to. Think of it as the script you never gave the AI that may already be speaking for you.

I tried it for Embers + Apothecary. The work itself was not especially technical. The harder part was strategic. I had to think about the business from the customer's side of the search bar. Not just what do we offer, but what is someone trying to solve when they might need us. For Embers, that means questions like:

• Where can I take a group in Chicago that feels different from dinner?

• What is a creative date idea that does not feel awkward?

• What can my team do together that is social, structured, and still easy to participate in?

Once I had that mapped out, I used AI to help turn the thinking into a structured plain-text file. A few hours later, Embers + Apothecary was showing up first in Perplexity for candle-making in Chicago.

I can't prove the file caused that result. AI search is still too opaque for clean attribution. There was no controlled test, no tidy before-and-after report, no dashboard with a satisfying little arrow pointing up. But for a few hours of work and no ad spend, it was enough of a signal to keep paying attention.

A few weeks later, I was reviewing an AI search strategy an agency had built for a founder I work with on business strategy. It was a good agency and a thoughtful plan. Their recommendation focused heavily on cleaner content formatting, which matters. But it also reminded me how early this space still is. A lot of AI search advice is still treating the issue like a formatting problem. For founders, I think it is also a positioning problem. If AI tools are going to summarize your business, what are they summarizing from? If they are going to decide when you are relevant, have you made that relevance clear? If they are going to compare you to other options, have you given them the language to understand what makes you meaningfully different? That is the part small business owners can still do without a large budget, a technical team, or another monthly retainer.

The data on whether every platform reads these files is genuinely mixed. Google has said it does not use them. Other AI-native platforms appear more open to structured context, but the standard is still young. I am not telling you this is guaranteed. I am saying this feels like one of those rare digital marketing moments where the first useful move may not be spending more money. It may be clearer thinking.

For anyone who wants to experiment, this is the kind of prompt to start with:

"I need to build an llms.txt file for my business. I [describe what you do and who your customer is]. What questions does my customer ask when they are looking for what I offer? Help me turn those into a structured plain text file that tells AI who I am, what I offer, and what questions I want to be the answer to."

You’ll probably have to iterate and refine, but once you have the file, then try this:

"I just built an llms.txt file. I have a [Wix/Shopify/WordPress/other] website. Walk me through the simplest way to make this file live on my website."

Small businesses are asked to pay for visibility constantly. Every now and then, it is worth noticing when the better first move might be to give the machines a clearer brief.