Does llms.txt do anything?

Almost nothing, for a marketing site. Ahrefs checked 137,000 domains in June 2026 and found 97% of the roughly 38,000 with a valid llms.txt got zero requests for it in a month. Google has said three separate times that it doesn't use them, and no other AI company has said anything about consuming one. We serve one on desses.co anyway. Here's why that's fine, and why nobody should be charging you for it.

Bias first. Desses put llms.txt on client sites through most of 2025, and I'm about to argue against the reasons I gave at the time. Everyone else writing about this is selling something.

What the file actually is

llms.txt is a plain markdown file at the root of a website that lists the pages the site's author thinks a language model should read. Jeremy Howard proposed it at Answer.AI on 3 September 2024. No standards body behind it. No W3C, no IETF, no RFC. One person wrote a good idea down and the industry built a cottage industry on it inside eighteen months.

Howard's framing is the part that got lost. "Site authors know best, and can provide a list of content that an LLM should use."

Read that again. It describes a context window problem. A model is already on your site and needs help getting around a hundred pages of navigation and JavaScript. It says nothing about discovery, and nothing about ranking. Most of what's built on top of it quietly swapped the second meaning in for the first.

What the AI companies have said

Google's three, in order.

John Mueller, on r/TechSEO in April 2025: "AFAIK none of the AI services have said they're using LLMs.TXT (and you can tell when you look at your server logs that they don't even check for it). To me, it's comparable to the keywords meta tag. (Is the site really like that? well, you can check it. At that point, why not just check the site directly?)"

Gary Illyes said the same at a Google Search Central Deep Dive in July 2025, as reported from the session: not supported, not planned, won't be crawled. That one reached the industry through a LinkedIn write-up rather than a transcript, so treat the wording as a rendering.

Mueller again on Bluesky in January 2026, asked whether Google hosting llms.txt files on its own properties was an endorsement: "I'm tempted to say something snarky since this has come up so often, but to be direct, no." Then it went from offhand remark into the documentation. Google's "AI features and your website" page now says it plainly: "You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features."

One company has answered. Of OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity and Microsoft, none has made any public statement about consuming llms.txt. One rebuttal comes back every time: OpenAI and Anthropic both publish llms.txt files for their own developer docs, and that gets read as a quiet yes. It's them making their own documentation fit inside a context window, and it tells you nothing about what their crawlers request from your site. Mueller was asked that exact question about Google's own files. The answer was no.

Does anything actually fetch it

The logs are less forgiving than the statements.

In June 2026 Ahrefs checked 137,000 domains and found 28% publishing an llms.txt, with 97% of the roughly 38,000 valid files getting zero requests during May 2026. Read that 28% carefully. It's the strongest thing in the study. Those domains belong to Ahrefs Web Analytics customers, people who buy SEO tools, the most llms.txt-aware population anybody has measured, and their adoption runs three to five times higher than every independent count of the open web. 97 in every 100 of them still got nothing. In the same dataset, Slackbot fetched more llms.txt files than PerplexityBot did.

Otterly's 90-day server-log study on a site serving one caught 84 of 62,100 AI bot requests hitting /llms.txt, which is 0.1%, against around 265 AI bot visits to an ordinary content page in the same window. SE Ranking built a model to predict which pages get cited in AI answers, across 300,000 domains. Adding llms.txt as a variable made the model worse.

The counter-evidence, so you have it. Ray Martinez posted screenshots in 2025 showing OpenAI's crawler hitting llms.txt every fifteen minutes across a few sites, apparently checking freshness. One practitioner, screenshots only, never replicated. At face value it shows a crawler fetching a file. Whether anything in that file reached retrieval or ranking is a separate question nobody has answered.

Adoption is climbing, which is the argument you'll hear next. Depending on who's counting and how strictly they validate, between 5.61% and 10.13% of sites now publish one, up from about 1% a year earlier. Those are publishers adopting it, which says nothing about engines consuming it, and treating the first as evidence of the second is the most common mistake in every article written about this file.

Where it genuinely works

Developer documentation. That's the case Howard made, and it holds.

Paste yourdocs.com/llms.txt into Claude or ChatGPT and the model gets your API surface in one shot. If a coding agent is wired to look for it, same. Anthropic, OpenAI, Vercel and Stripe all publish one for that reason. Docs that fit in a context window.

If you sell an API or a developer tool, ship one and keep it current. If you sell websites, or compact battery storage, or audit automation, you're writing for an audience that isn't coming. Nobody pastes your services page into a chat window to understand your company, and the crawlers that build the indexes AI cites from are reading your HTML.

What to ship instead

Three things, each with a confirmed effect behind it.

Server-render your pages. No major AI crawler executes JavaScript. Vercel measured that across billions of requests in December 2024, and searchVIU tested five AI systems in December 2025 and found Gemini the only one rendering JavaScript on a direct live fetch. A client-rendered React site with no server rendering isn't competing on content quality in AI search. It isn't in the running. This is the check to run before anything else, and it's the one most sites fail.

Put anything you want quoted in visible body text. Markup supplements visible content and never replaces it. When searchVIU planted the same product prices in visible HTML and in hidden JSON-LD, none of the five systems pulled anything out of the JSON-LD on a direct fetch. Sample size is one page. Take it as direction.

Let the retrieval bots in, specifically. GPTBot builds training corpora. OAI-SearchBot builds the index ChatGPT cites from. Different crawlers, completely different consequences for blocking. Plenty of sites blocked the wrong one, kept their content out of nothing, and removed themselves from AI search. Same structure at Anthropic with ClaudeBot and Claude-SearchBot.

So should you ship one?

Yes, if it costs you an afternoon. No, if anyone's charging you for it as a line item.

desses.co/llms.txt exists. On Framer it's a manual upload under Site Settings, Hosting, Files, on a Pro plan. Twenty minutes to write, and a cheap bet on a convention that might get adopted. Cheap bets on conventions are fine. Selling one as an AI visibility service is not, and reporting it as a result is worse.

Run the check yourself before you believe any of this. Grep a month of access logs for llms.txt and see who's actually asking. It takes a minute and it settles the question for your site better than this article can.

If you want someone to look at whether AI can actually read your site, I'm around this week. Send me your URL and I'll tell you what your logs say about your llms.txt, which is either interesting or a very short email.