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This episode is sponsored by Calibrate iq. First, a disclaimer. In the interest of being transparent, I created Calibrate iq. It's my app and I built it because I wasn't satisfied with any of the other risk tolerance tools on the market. I found that other tools didn't work the way I wanted them to. They focus too much on risk preference rather than time horizon. They're clunky and overcomplicated and they're too expensive for what they do. And they aren't user friendly for clients. I designed Calibrate IQ to be simple, easy to use and low cost. It lets you send a single magic link to any client you want to survey. Clients fill out a simple survey that takes less than two minutes. Once that's done, you can automatically generate an investment policy statement instantly and deliver a beautiful branded report to the client. It lets you customize reports with your logo and brand colors and you can even add your own custom investment preferences to the questionnaire. If you're tired of expensive risk tolerance tools that overthink the process, try CalibrateIQ. It's $9 a month with a seven day free trial. Give it a try at CalibrateIQ app again. That's CalibrateIQ app. Hey everyone. Welcome to Ops and Impact where we discuss operations and marketing for independent financial advisors building a lifestyle practice. I'm your host, Michael Reynolds and today we're going to get a little bit tactical, a little bit specific and tech oriented. We're going to talk about potentially enhancing your AI visibility with the LLMs txt file. Alrighty. It sounds nerdy already. I know. So bear with me. Let's frame it first. So a lot more prospective clients are turning to chat GPT perplexity AI tools and asking for things like find a fiduciary financial advisor near me or find a fee only financial advisor near me or just find a financial advisor near me or find a financial advisory that works with retirees. They're searching on AI tools, they're asking questions from their AI tool to find financial advisors. Or they might be asking financial questions that are just general in nature. They're still using Google. Plenty of people still use Google and search engines, but AI tools are now in the mix more often and they're getting more heavily used by consumers looking for either financial information or financial advisors. So obviously this leads to the discussion that a lot of financial advisors are happening are having in different forums that I'm in and that is how do I get found on AI tools? So there's a lot of things we can talk about. I've actually got a future episode planned to talk more about this, but there's one little thing that has come up and I want to talk it over because it might be worth considering. It's not. This is not a huge thing. It's just a little thing. It's almost, I wouldn't say inconsequential, but it might become consequential. And it's the LLMs Txt file. It is a specific file that has been proposed as a potential file that guides AI tools how to read your website. So there's a couple different camps on this. One camp says don't worry about it. It's hype. It's basically not in production yet. No one's actually indexing it. Server logs are proving that no one's even using it. So don't worry about it. There's another camp that says, hey, go ahead and add it, because it's super simple to add and it's already going to be in place if and when AI tools start using it to index your site. So let's talk about what it is first. So what is the LLMs txt file? It's a plain text file written in markdown and is placed at the root of your website. So for example, if it's.com, it'll be at LLMs TXT. So what is it supposed to do? It's supposed to serve up information to AI models and give it a curated map to your site's most valuable content. Things like the services page, your fee schedules, your FAQs, your planning process, stuff that is the most relevant so that AI tools don't have to guess. It's kind of like a one page summary that gives you a referral source so they can describe you. Or to give to a referral source, they can describe you accurately instead of just kind of, kind of making it up. So how does it differ from files you already have, like robots Txt, for example, or sitemap xml? These are also files that have been around for a while and they're important for indexing. So let's talk about those first. So robots Txt has been around for a while and that controls what search crawlers are allowed to access and it affects your real Google visibility. It has been that way for a long time. Another file called sitemap.xml lists every page on your site so search engines can find and index all of it. So it's about covering your whole site, making kind of a machine friendly map to your site. And it's really aimed at traditional search engines. The LLMs txt file is the opposite of a sitemap. Instead of listing everything, it curates a few of the most specific and important pages and. And adds a plain language context for AI models about what it is and why it matters. And that's a contrast to a sitemap. Sitemap says here's everything. The LLMs txt file says, here's what's worth paying attention to. So that's how it functions. So here's the deal, though. No major AI provider, not OpenAI, anthropic, Google, no one has committed to using it. It's a proposed standard, and people have studied server logs and they're showing that crawlers don't even really check for the file, at least today. So there's no evidence that actually improves AI visibility yet. But is there a case for doing it? Yeah, I think you should probably do it because these proposed standards sometimes have a way of becoming reality. It's very low effort. There's no risk to doing it. It's free to do it. And so if you're an early adopter, you're already set up and ready to go if this standard gets adopted. And so why does it matter for us as financial advisors? So trust and accuracy are really important in our profession. We want to make sure that AI tools are getting good descriptions of things like our fee structures, fiduciary status services, getting all that stuff correct, and that can be useful. So if that standard does get adopted, that can be a good way to make sure that we're already set up for this stuff. So practical takeaway. So if you want to implement this, it's pretty simple. There's tools out there already that will generate the LLMs txt file. You can ask any AI tool to create one for you for your website, and then you install that at the root of your website, and that just sits there and it's ready. If this standard does get adopted, I would say it's low risk, it's easy to do, Nothing wrong with it. No, no downside to doing it. So I would go ahead and probably add it. I'm going to be adding it to my sites here shortly just to get ready for it. So do you want to add it? Do you want to not add it? It's up to you, but I think it's worth doing just to be ready. So that's my tech tip for the day. Again, I called this title potentially enhancing your AI visibility, because this is only potential. I'm not saying it's going to do anything today but it might be a preemptive measure to get ready for this potential standard that might get adopted and it might help AI visibility. Feel free to read about it by googling LLMs txt. Pop that into Google or AI Tools and they'll tell you more about it. But I want to bring your attention to it in case it's something you want to start implementing. All right, like I said, short, nerdy, simple, tech oriented episode for today. If you have questions about this feel free to reach out. You can find me on my website for Advisors which is MichaelReynolds.com I have tons of resources there including a way to contact me through voice memos. You can ask me questions that way. Also a bunch of free resources on my website so feel free to find that@michaelreynolds.com all right. Thanks for joining me today. Have a great day. See you next time.