We Analyzed 137K Sites: 97% of llms.txt Files Never Get Read

2026-06-16

Despite growing adoption driven by speculation about AI benefits, 97% of llms.txt files received zero readers in May. Of the limited traffic, 77% originated from non-AI bots, with most AI access coming from coding agents like Claude Code, not search tools. Perplexity and ChatGPT combined accounted for only 1.1% of requests, and no AI system actively searched for the file when it was not present.