Setting up llms.txt for a maritime corporate website

An llms.txt file sits in the root of your website at /llms.txt and tells AI crawlers, in plain markdown, what your site is about and which pages they should pay attention to. It is the closest thing the GEO discipline has to a robots.txt for generation models, and for maritime corporate sites it is a high-value piece of work.

The file does not guarantee citations. What it does is make your site legible to parsers that are otherwise trying to make sense of a navigation-heavy WordPress build with twelve menu levels and three different “About” pages.

What a maritime llms.txt looks like

A reasonable structure for a ship management company:

# Acme Ship Management

> Independent third-party ship manager based in Limassol, Singapore and Hamburg.
> ISM DOC certified for tanker, bulker and gas carrier vessels above 5,000 GT.
> Operating since 1994. 84 vessels under technical management as of Q1 2026.

## Services

- [Technical management](https://example.com/services/technical-management): Full
  technical management for tanker, bulker and gas carrier fleets.
- [Crew management](https://example.com/services/crew-management): Crewing for
  Greek, Cypriot, Filipino and Indian officers and ratings.
- [Newbuilding supervision](https://example.com/services/newbuilding-supervision):
  On-site supervision at Korean, Japanese and Chinese yards.

## Certifications and memberships

- [ISM DOC certification](https://example.com/certifications/ism)
- [DNV class memberships](https://example.com/certifications/dnv)
- [Intertanko membership](https://example.com/memberships/intertanko)

## Case studies

- [VLCC fleet transition to LNG](https://example.com/cases/vlcc-lng)
- [Bulker EEXI compliance retrofit](https://example.com/cases/eexi-retrofit)

## Contact

- Limassol: +357 25 ...
- Singapore: +65 6 ...
- Hamburg: +49 40 ...

The file is intentionally short. It points at the substantive pages and gives a parser the orientation it needs to navigate the site quickly.

What to put in and what to leave out

Include

Your core services with one-line descriptions that include specifics: vessel types, regions, certifications.
Your real corporate facts: founding year, fleet size, office locations, key memberships.
Your most important case studies and capability pages.
Your primary contact methods.

Leave out

Marketing landing pages that exist for paid campaigns. They confuse the parser about what your real services are.
Blog post archives in their entirety. Link to your pillar pages instead.
Career pages, privacy policies and other operational pages that are not relevant to category questions.
Outdated office locations or services you are quietly winding down.

The honesty test

The single biggest mistake we see on maritime llms.txt files is aspirational copy. A company claims “global presence” when they have one office and three agents on retainer. They list “AI-powered fleet analytics” because the marketing team likes the phrase, even though the service does not exist as a productised offering.

LLMs will quote you. If you write something in llms.txt that contradicts what your service pages, your DNV listing and your trade press coverage say, the model will hedge or pick whichever source it trusts more, which is usually not you. Worse, if a buyer follows up on a quoted claim and finds it does not hold, you have lost the deal before the first call.

Write llms.txt the way you would brief a journalist who has fifteen minutes. Specific, accurate, verifiable.

llms-full.txt: the longer version

Some sites also publish llms-full.txt: the full markdown content of every page listed in llms.txt, concatenated into a single document. For a maritime corporate site with twenty to forty key pages, this is achievable. It saves the crawler from having to fetch each page individually and makes the most important content available in one request.

If you are already exporting your CMS content to markdown for any other reason, generating llms-full.txt is cheap. If you are not, start with the short llms.txt and add the longer version once your basic structure is in place.

The discipline rewards completeness, but it rewards accuracy more. A ten-page llms.txt that is true beats a forty-page one that is wishful.

Frequently asked questions

Is llms.txt mandatory?

No. It is a community proposal rather than a standard, and major LLM crawlers do not strictly require it. But it is a low-cost, high-clarity signal that helps the parsers find your most important content quickly. Treat it as a sitemap.xml for the AI era.

Should llms.txt and llms-full.txt both exist?

If you have the time, yes. The short llms.txt is a curated overview pointing at your key pages. The llms-full.txt is the concatenated content of those pages in plain markdown so a crawler can ingest the substance in one fetch. For a maritime corporate site of moderate size, both are achievable.

Where should llms.txt live and how do crawlers find it?

Place it at the root of your domain at /llms.txt and explicitly allow the path in robots.txt. Some retrieval systems probe the root directly, others look for a hint in robots.txt or a link from the homepage. There is no single discovery convention yet, so make the file easy to find from all three angles rather than relying on default behaviour.