KinetixSEO crawl study
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.
Measured · n = 32 · cohort: the top 50 sites of the Tranco ranking (list 64VVX)
The numbers
5 of 32 (15.6%)
- Publish an llms.txt file
- 5
- No llms.txt (404, empty file, or an HTML page in its place)
- 27
- Sites observed (sample size)
- 32
- Listed but unreachable on the day (excluded)
- 18 of 50
The headline rounds to a whole percent (16%); the exact share is 15.6% of the observed sample.
Methodology
How this was measured
Requested /llms.txt on each of the 32 the top 50 sites of the Tranco ranking (list 64VVX) and counted the sites returning a non-empty plain-text file, not a 404 and not an HTML page served in its place (a redirect to the homepage or a soft 404).
One observation: Whether the site serves a non-empty plain-text file at /llms.txt, rather than a 404 or an HTML page in its place.
How the cohort was chosen: Tranco list 64VVX (tranco-list.eu, a research-grade ranking of popular domains), generated 2026-10-16, accessed 2026-10-17.
Every request was a single polite fetch per site with a short timeout and no retries. Only aggregate counts are published — no per-site result.
Limitations
What this figure does not tell you
- The cohort is a named, hand-curated list, not a random sample of the web. The share describes these sites, not every site.
- It is one measurement on the date shown. Any site can change its setup the next day.
- 18 of the 50 listed URLs could not be reached or read on the day and were left out of the sample rather than counted either way.
- Only whether a non-empty, non-HTML file is served at /llms.txt was checked, not its content or quality.
How to cite
Use this data
KinetixSEO (2026). llms.txt adoption among the top 50 sites of the Tranco ranking (list 64VVX) [Data set]. KinetixSEO crawl study, measured 17 October 2026, n = 32. https://kinetixseo.com/learn/studies/paper-c-seo-bench-does-conversational-seo-wor-rr2svr
Published under a CC BY 4.0 license: free to reuse with attribution. Download the aggregate results as CSV (every published run of this study).
Every published run
Run history
| Measured | Publish an llms.txt file | Share | Sample size | Unreachable |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5 | 15.6% | n = 32 | 18 of 50 |
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