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Link descriptions

Description coverage and quality

In short: Give every link a description after the colon that says what the page answers, averaging 70 characters or more.

  • Category: Curation Quality · weight 16 of 100 within the category
  • Curation Quality is worth 25 in generic and commerce, 20 in regulated and technical (points of 100, by scoring profile)
  • Audit ID C2 (as shown on reports) · rubric v2.1

What it checks

How many links carry a description, and whether each says what the page answers.

Why it matters

An agent picks which link to follow from its description. “Learn more” tells it nothing; “How refunds are calculated for partial months” tells it exactly when to go there.

When it applies

Applies when the file has links. A file with no links is Not applicable here.

An audit that doesn't apply, or that we couldn't verify, is removed from your score and its weight shared among the Curation Quality audits that do apply. It is never scored as a zero.

How it's scored

0.5 × the share of links with a description + 0.5 × min(1, mean description length ÷ 70 characters). Describing every link at an average of 35 characters scores 0.75; at 70 or more, 1.0.

How to fix

  1. Give every link a description after the colon.
  2. Describe the question the page answers, not the page’s title again.
  3. Keep descriptions to one line; specific beats long.

Example

- [Refund policy](https://acme.com/refunds.md): How refunds are calculated for partial months, and how long they take

Frequently asked questions

What counts as a link description?
The text after the colon on a link line, as in - [Refund policy](https://acme.com/refunds.md): How refunds are calculated for partial months: the spec’s “optionally a : and notes about the file”. It has to be longer than one character. On a bare-URL line such as - Refund policy: https://acme.com/refunds.md, the label before the colon is read as the description.

Sources: llmstxt.org — The /llms.txt file, v2 · LLMSRank — Link descriptions audit

How long should link descriptions be?
About 70 characters on average is enough. Without a judged quality score, the check is 0.5 × share of links described + 0.5 × min(1, mean description length ÷ 70), so describing every link at an average of 35 characters scores 0.75 and at 70 or more scores 1.0; longer earns nothing extra. The proposal asks for “brief, informative descriptions”, so aim for one specific line per link.

Sources: LLMSRank — Link descriptions audit · llmstxt.org — The /llms.txt file, v2

Is repeating the page title as the description good enough?
No. Where LLMSRank has a model-judged quality score for your descriptions, it replaces the length measure: a description that states the question the page answers scores 1.0, a generic one such as “Documentation for our API” 0.6, and one that restates the title or is marketing copy 0.3. Write what the page answers, such as “How refunds are calculated for partial months”, and avoid what the proposal calls “ambiguous terms or unexplained jargon”.

Sources: LLMSRank — Link descriptions audit · llmstxt.org — The /llms.txt file, v2

How well do real llms.txt files describe their links?
In our research, 174 of the 187 sites in our corpus (captured 2026-10-10, scored with rubric v2.1) had links to score. Only 51 (29.3%) earned full marks, 10.9% scored zero, typically because no link carried a description, and the mean was 0.757. cloudflare.com, attio.com, jasper.ai, apify.com and qdrant.tech are good examples.

Sources: LLMSRank — Method · LLMSRank — Link descriptions audit