Google said llms.txt does nothing. I checked what 137,210 domains actually got.

说明与用途

llms.txt 并未提升 AI 搜索可见度，得到 Google 与四项独立研究的证实。

问题

Site owners believed llms.txt would improve AI search visibility, but evidence shows it has negligible impact.

结果

All studies and Google documentation confirm llms.txt has no measurable effect on AI search visibility; it is a developer documentation tool, not an SEO tactic.

工作流

• 1. Build an audit tool to detect llms.txt.
• 2. Collect data from Ahrefs, SE Ranking, OtterlyAI, and Limy on llms.txt presence and bot traffic.
• 3. Analyze traffic patterns and correlation with AI visibility.
• 4. Update audit tool to flag llms.txt without scoring it.
• 5. Focus on content-level signals (crawlability, citations, semantic structure).

证据

You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, markup, or Markdown to appear in generative AI search.

来源

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).

来源

28% of the 137,210 domains publish an llms.txt file (about 38,000 sites). 97% of those files received zero traffic in May 2026.

来源

The largest single research crawler in the dataset identified itself as prompt-injection-survey/1.0.

来源

OtterlyAI ran a controlled experiment over 90 days. 84 of 62,100+ AI bot visits targeted /llms.txt.

来源

Limy's analysis monitored 515,382,577 AI bot traffic events over a 90‑day window. 408 requests targeted /llms.txt directly.

来源