The forgotten llms.txt still describing your old website

What we found

When we rebuilt onintel.com, there was an llms.txt file at the root of the site. It described the old website: services we no longer offer, such as viral marketing and social media, and links to pages that no longer existed.

It had been generated by an SEO plugin that had already been removed. The plugin was gone. Its file was not.

What llms.txt is

llms.txt is a plain-text summary placed at /llms.txt, proposed so that language models can quickly understand who a site belongs to and where its important pages are. It is not an official standard, and there is no guarantee that a given assistant reads it. More and more AI tools do look for it, and when they find it, it is written by you, so they tend to trust it.

That is why an outdated llms.txt is worse than none: it gives AI a clear, confident and wrong description of your business.

Why an uninstalled plugin keeps talking

The plugin did not generate the file on each request. It wrote a physical file to the server. Uninstalling a plugin removes its code, not the files it created.

A physical file is also served directly by the web server, before WordPress runs. Even if you install a new tool that generates llms.txt from your current pages, the old file stays in front of it and nobody sees the new one.

How to check yours

• Open /llms.txt on your site. Does it list the services you sell today, with working links and in the right language?
• Run curl -I https://yoursite.com/llms.txt and look at Last-Modified. A date from before your last redesign is a warning sign.
• If a plugin should be generating the file, look in the root folder of your hosting for a real llms.txt file. If one exists, it is the one being served.

How we fixed it

We deleted the static file. llms.txt is now generated from the pages that are actually published on this site, in both languages, and it changes when a page is edited. Pages marked as not indexable stay out of it.

The same pages also produce /services.json, the list of services in a format made for machines. Neither file invents anything that is not on the site: where there are no public prices, they say so.

The wider lesson

Everything written for machines ages in silence: llms.txt, robots.txt, old sitemaps, structured data hard-coded in a theme. None of it shows on screen, so none of it gets reviewed. After every redesign or migration, open each one and read it as a machine would.