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llms.txt in WooCommerce: automatic and manual

Updated 2026-08-03

How llms.txt in WooCommerce is different

The general idea of the file is covered in the llms.txt for your store guide: a short curated map of your shop for language models. This guide is about the WooCommerce specifics, where two things are different.

First, the catalog is alive: prices, stock and categories change constantly in WooCommerce. A static file built once by hand goes stale within a week. Second, WordPress routes URLs its own way, so a physical file in the root behaves differently from a virtual route served by a plugin. That gives WooCommerce two paths: build llms.txt automatically or place it by hand.

Why it is worth the effort at all: by the AI traffic index, a two-week window across a panel of three stores drew about 1,005,146 AI-bot requests, and the single most-read product pulled 73,715. Bots already crawl catalogs at scale — llms.txt helps them grasp your store's structure faster than parsing dozens of HTML pages.

The two paths at a glance

	Automatic (plugin)	Manual
Who builds it	the plugin, from the catalog	you
Updates	itself, when the catalog changes	by hand after every edit
Categories and products	pulled from WooCommerce	typed in manually
Best for	a live catalog	a small, static one

Automatic: the Botmetria plugin

The Botmetria plugin for WooCommerce generates llms.txt from your own catalog and keeps it current. It pulls data straight from the store:

• product categories — catalog sections linking to /product-category/...;
• key products — best sellers and important pages;
• policies — shipping, returns, payment and contact pages;
• store description — what you sell, where, and with what delivery.

The point is that the file updates when the catalog changes. Add a category, mark a product out of stock, edit the returns page — llms.txt rebuilds itself. You do not keep it current by hand, and that is exactly where it usually breaks: the file is built once and forgotten.

The same plugin also outputs a correct JSON-LD Product with price, currency and availability, so your catalog becomes readable for AI from both sides: the map in llms.txt and the product data in the markup.

Manual: a file in the root

If you would rather not install the plugin, you can place llms.txt by hand. WooCommerce gives you two working ways.

Option 1 — a physical file. Through your host's File Manager or over FTP, drop a text file named llms.txt into the site root — next to wp-config.php and .htaccess (usually public_html). The standard WordPress .htaccess serves existing files directly instead of routing them — that is what the RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f rule does. The file opens at https://your-store.com/llms.txt.

Option 2 — a virtual route. If you have no file access, serve the file with a snippet. Add this to your child theme's functions.php or a code-snippets plugin:

add_action('init', function () {
  if (trim($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], '/') === 'llms.txt') {
    header('Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8');
    echo "# Example Store\n\n> What we sell and how we ship.\n\n## Catalog\n- ...\n";
    exit;
  }
});

What goes inside is covered in the general guide: a title, a description line, 3-4 sections of 3-6 links. For WooCommerce, link to categories (/product-category/), a few key products and your policy pages — not the whole catalog of hundreds of items.

Where it lives and how to check

1. Open https://your-store.com/llms.txt in a browser. You should see plain text, not a styled page and not a 404.
2. Check the response type. WordPress is tricky: a missing address is sometimes served as an HTML 404 page but with a 200 OK code. To AI that is garbage. llms.txt must be served as text/plain with a 200 code. The fastest check is curl -sI https://your-store.com/llms.txt — look for HTTP/2 200 and content-type: text/plain in the response.
3. Confirm the links inside point to live catalog pages, not 404s and not http.
4. Run a free Botmetria audit — it checks whether llms.txt is present and correct and shows whether AI bots have requested it. This is the discovery category, 20% of the AI-readiness score.

Common WooCommerce mistakes

• The cache serves an old copy. Caching plugins (WP Super Cache, LiteSpeed) can cache llms.txt. Clear the cache after edits.
• WordPress hijacked the URL. The virtual route returns HTML instead of text, or the theme's 404 page fires. Check the content-type, not just whether it "opens".
• The whole catalog dumped in. 500 products in the file is a pile, not a map. Categories and best sellers, 10-20 links.
• Built once and forgotten. A WooCommerce catalog changes weekly; the file does not. Either update it after every edit, or let the plugin do it.

FAQ

Related guides

• llms.txt for your store in 30 minutes (+ ready template)