We looked for the file everyone tells you to add. Almost nothing has ever fetched it.
137,210 domains. 97% of their llms.txt files received zero requests in a month. Here is the hour better spent.
Ahrefs, June 2026 · July 16, 2026 · 3 min read
llms.txt is a proposed standard: a Markdown file at the root of your site telling AI models
what it contains and where the important pages are. It has been recommended in essentially
every AI-visibility guide published since early 2025, and it appears as a line item in agency
proposals at four figures.
In June 2026 Ahrefs checked whether anything reads it. They looked at 137,210 domains for a
root llms.txt returning HTTP 200, screened out soft-404s, verified the files were genuinely
Markdown, then went to their own bot analytics to see who had requested them.
28% of domains had published one. 97% of those files received zero traffic in May 2026 — nothing fetched them at all. Of the 3% that got any traffic, 96% of requests were bots and only 19.5% came from a named AI tool.
Their caveat is worth stating: the panel skews technical and SEO-aware, so 28% is an upper bound on adoption; and they measured requests, not whether anything acted on the contents.
An independent tracker reaches the same conclusion from the other direction. Across three
million-plus sites, Originality.ai recorded llms.txt instances growing from 4,088 in June
2025 to 36,120 in May 2026 — adoption grew roughly nine-fold and usage did not move.
And the plainest statement available, from Google’s John Mueller in June 2025:
“FWIW no AI system currently uses llms.txt.”
No vendor has contradicted him since. Google’s own documentation for site owners goes further, in a sentence worth quoting whenever someone quotes a price at you for this:
“You don’t need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features.”
Is the file harmful? No. It costs an hour, it breaks nothing, and if a major model starts consuming it tomorrow, you were early. Our objection is not to the file. It is to it being sold as work, and to it occupying the slot in a budget where something with evidence behind it should sit.
So here is the hour better spent, and this is the point of the article.
Take the same sixty minutes and do this instead: open your site in a browser with JavaScript
disabled. If the page goes blank or loses its text, you have found a real problem — one that
stops any crawler that does not execute JavaScript from seeing anything at all. That is gate
one, item four on our list, and unlike llms.txt it is measurable, consequential, and
frequently broken.
If the page survives, spend the hour on the second thing: take your main service page and move the answer to the top. Whatever the page is for, say it in the first sentence, in the words a customer would use. Across 15.7 million AI citations, four in five reused passages state their answer in the opening sentence.
Neither of those is exciting. Both are supported by measurement, and both take the same hour.
Why this pattern keeps happening. llms.txt is attractive for the same reason schema
packages and keyword density were attractive: it is a discrete artefact, it can be delivered,
invoiced and shown to a client. Work that consists of rewriting a paragraph so it stands alone
is harder to put on an invoice and worth considerably more.
When someone quotes you for AI visibility work, the useful question is not what they will deliver. It is which of the things on the list has been measured, and by whom.
