# llms.txt will not get you cited. Here is the data.

> 97% of published llms.txt files got zero requests in one measured month across 137,210 domains. Here's what the file is actually for.

Published: 2025-06-23
Updated: 2025-06-23
Canonical: https://augustynglowacki.com/posts/llms-txt-will-not-get-you-cited/

## What does Google actually say about llms.txt?

"You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, markup, or Markdown to appear in Google Search (including its generative AI capabilities), as Google Search itself doesn't use them" ([Google AI optimization guide](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/ai-optimization-guide)). That's a direct statement from the one search engine that publishes detailed guidance on this question, and it isn't hedged.

## What did John Mueller say about it?

Reconciling that guidance against Chrome's Lighthouse team shipping an experimental llms.txt check in its Agentic Browsing audits, Google's John Mueller called llms.txt "not done for search" - a "temporary crutch, perhaps to save some tokens" for AI coding tools parsing developer documentation, not a search or citation mechanism ([quoted in Ahrefs' study](https://ahrefs.com/blog/llmstxt-study/) and covered by [Search Engine Journal](https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-says-llms-txt-is-purely-speculative-for-now/577576/)). No engine - not OpenAI, not Anthropic, not Perplexity - has ever documented llms.txt as a retrieval or citation input.

## Who is actually requesting these files, when anyone does?

Mostly not AI. Of the 3% of llms.txt files that did get fetched in [Ahrefs' study](https://ahrefs.com/blog/llmstxt-study/), 96% of requests came from bots, and 77% of those bots weren't AI tools at all - Slackbot's link-preview fetcher hit llms.txt more often than PerplexityBot did. Another 12% of fetches were tools studying llms.txt files, not consuming them for any downstream purpose. And zero AI bots probed for an llms.txt file that didn't exist, which is the behavior you'd expect if any crawler treated the file's presence as informative.

## So what is llms.txt actually for?

Orienting coding agents and IDE tools around developer documentation - the use case Mueller named directly. Perplexity's own documentation site serves an llms.txt for exactly that reason. If your content already lives as markdown - which it does, if you're using [the no-CMS approach I build](/services/ai-editable-no-cms/) - shipping a correctly-scoped llms.txt costs nothing extra and helps a coding agent working in your docs. It is not, and should not be sold as, a lever for getting cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews.

## What should you check instead?

Whether the crawlers that actually decide citation can reach your pages at all, at robots.txt, at your CDN, and at your WAF. GPTBot trains models and doesn't feed answers; the bots that decide what gets cited are the search-and-retrieval ones - OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, Claude-User, PerplexityBot. Ahrefs frames the contrast in one line worth keeping: "llms.txt might not impact your visibility online, but robots.txt definitely does." Check that file first, not llms.txt.

## Sources

- [Ahrefs, "We Analyzed 137,210 Sites With llms.txt", 15 June 2026](https://ahrefs.com/blog/llmstxt-study/)
- [SE Ranking, llms.txt correlation study, 7 November 2025](https://seranking.com/blog/llms-txt/)
- [Google, AI optimization guide](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/ai-optimization-guide)
- [Search Engine Journal, on Mueller's llms.txt comments](https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-says-llms-txt-is-purely-speculative-for-now/577576/)

## Sources

- [Ahrefs, "We Analyzed 137,210 Sites With llms.txt", 15 June 2026](https://ahrefs.com/blog/llmstxt-study/)
- [SE Ranking, llms.txt correlation study, 7 November 2025](https://seranking.com/blog/llms-txt/)
- [Google, AI optimization guide](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/ai-optimization-guide)
- [Search Engine Journal, on Mueller's llms.txt comments](https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-says-llms-txt-is-purely-speculative-for-now/577576/)