KinetixSEO research sweep · November 2026
How Many Websites Have an llms.txt File?
18% of the websites we scanned publish an llms.txt file.
The other 82% serve no llms.txt: a 404, an empty file, or an HTML page in its place.
Based on 6,226 homepages of public websites (Tranco ranks 1,000 to 100,000, drawn at random), scanned 5 to 12 November 2026. See the full edition.
18% of 6,226 sites
What it means
Why this number matters
llms.txt is a plain-text file at the root of a site that lists the pages a language model should read first. It was proposed in 2024 and no AI company has said its crawler uses it.
Whether an llms.txt file changes how often AI answers cite a site is not proven, so this share says how far the idea has spread, not what it is worth. The basics on the other statistic pages come first.
Check your own site: the free llms.txt Generator drafts an llms.txt for your site from a sample of its pages, in the llmstxt.org format.
Named groups
How specific groups of sites compare
Our crawl studies measure the same topic on small, named lists of sites, with their own check and method, so their shares are not directly comparable to the figure above.
- llms.txt adoption among public SEO and content-marketing tool vendor sites
Only 37% of the 41 public SEO and content-marketing tool vendor sites publish an llms.txt file at all. (n = 41)
- llms.txt adoption among the top 50 sites of the Tranco ranking (list 64VVX)
Only 16% of the 32 the top 50 sites of the Tranco ranking (list 64VVX) publish an llms.txt file at all. (n = 32)
Methodology
How this was measured
Scanned the homepage of each site in KinetixSEO's research sweep, a seeded random draw of public sites, between Nov 5, 2026 and Nov 12, 2026 with one unchanged version of the scanner, and counted the 6226 distinct sites on which the "Missing llms.txt file" check could run. A site counts once however often it was scanned, and counts as affected if any of its scans showed the issue. From scanner version 7 on, a site whose /llms.txt request got no usable answer (a timeout, a server error or a firewall refusal) is left out of the sample; in earlier sweeps it counted as having none, so their share is an upper bound. A site that answered with an HTML page in place of the file is counted as having none.
The draw, its seed and the scanner version are public on the edition page, so anyone can redraw the same sites. Only aggregate counts are published — no per-site result.
Every edition
Edition history
Each edition is a new random draw of sites, so a change between editions is partly sampling noise.
| Edition | Share | Sample size |
|---|---|---|
| November 2026 | 18% | n = 6,226 |
| October 2026 | 17% | n = 3,028 |
| October 2026 | 15% | n = 332 |
How to cite
Use this data
KinetixSEO (2026). How Many Websites Have an llms.txt File [Data set]. KinetixSEO research sweep, edition of November 2026, n = 6226. https://kinetixseo.com/learn/statistics/how-many-websites-have-llms-txt
Published under a CC BY 4.0 license: free to reuse with attribution. Download the edition's aggregate results as CSV or JSON .
More website statistics
- How Many Websites Block AI Crawlers? — At least 14% of the websites we scanned block at least one AI crawler in robots.txt.
- How Many Websites Use JSON-LD Structured Data? — 46% of the websites we scanned carry JSON-LD structured data on their homepage.
- How Many Websites Lack a Meta Description? — 22% of the websites we scanned have no meta description on their homepage.
- How Many Websites Have No XML Sitemap? — On 32% of the websites we scanned, no XML sitemap could be found.
- How Many Websites Miss Image Alt Text? — On 21% of the websites we scanned that show images on their homepage, at least one image has no alt text.
- How Many Sites Skip Privacy, Contact or About? — 68% of the homepages we scanned do not link all three of a privacy policy, a contact page and an about page.
Where does your own site land?
Run the same scan on your own homepage with a free SEO and GEO check. No signup.