Short answer: yes, because it costs almost nothing and can only help. Longer answer: yes, as long as you understand what it does, what it does not do, and where it sits in the priority list. Plenty of vendors are currently selling llms.txt as a magic switch for AI visibility. It is not one, and a padel club deserves a straight explanation.
What llms.txt actually is
llms.txt is a plain text file that lives at the root of your website, the same way robots.txt does. Where robots.txt tells crawlers what they may access, llms.txt tells AI systems what your site is about: a short description of your business, followed by a curated list of your most important pages with one-line explanations. It is a proposed convention, published as an open standard, and adopted because it is cheap to implement and easy for machines to parse.
Think of it as the front desk briefing you would give a new receptionist: who we are, what we offer, where to find the price list, where the booking page is. An AI system reading your site cold gets the same orientation in a few hundred words.
What it does not do
Honesty matters here. No major AI platform has committed to reading llms.txt on every visit, and adding the file will not, by itself, make ChatGPT recommend your club. If your pages are unreadable, your business name inconsistent, and your facts trapped in images, llms.txt fixes none of that. It is a signpost, and a signpost pointing at broken pages helps nobody.
The reasons to add it anyway are practical. Adoption costs an hour. Some AI tooling already reads it, more is likely to, and the file doubles as a forcing function: writing it makes you decide, in plain language, what your club is and which pages matter. Clubs that struggle to write their llms.txt usually discover their site lacks the pages it should point to, which is the real finding.
What a padel club’s llms.txt should contain
Open with one paragraph: club name, city, what you offer, and who it is for. Something like: a padel club in the north of the city with eight indoor courts, coaching for all levels, and online booking.
Then list your key pages, each with a one-line description. The booking page. The prices page. The courts and facilities page. The coaching and academy page. Your FAQ. Contact and directions. If a page on that list does not exist yet, that gap is more important than the file itself.
Keep it short, keep it factual, and update it when your offer changes. You can see the format live on this site: padelvisible.com/llms.txt describes what we do and lists every important page, including one for each market we cover, like our pages for Milan and Amsterdam.
Where it sits in the priority list
If your club has done nothing about AI visibility, llms.txt is not step one. Step one is making your facts readable: address, hours, courts, prices, booking path, as plain text on crawlable pages. Step two is consistency between your website, your Google Business Profile, and the booking platforms. Step three is structured data. llms.txt sits comfortably at step four: a cheap, sensible addition once the foundations exist.
The quickest way to see where you stand across all four is the free AI Readiness Scorecard, which checks your site the way an AI system reads it, llms.txt included, and hands you a prioritised fix list. Club owners can also start from our overview for padel clubs, which maps the common gaps we find in audits.
So yes, add the file. Just add it for the right reason: as one small, honest signal in a stack of signals, on a site that has already done the harder work of being worth pointing at.