KinetixSEO crawl study
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.
Measured · n = 41 · cohort: public SEO and content-marketing tool vendor sites
Across the web: 18% of the websites we scanned publish an llms.txt file (n = 6,226, November 2026). That figure comes from our research sweep, which scans the homepages of a random draw of public websites with its own method, so it is a comparison, not this group measured twice. See How Many Websites Have an llms.txt File?.
The numbers
15 of 41 (36.6%)
- Publish an llms.txt file
- 15
- No llms.txt (404, empty file, or an HTML page in its place)
- 26
- Sites observed (sample size)
- 41
- Listed but unreachable on the day (excluded)
- 1 of 42
- 1 refused our crawler outright (HTTP 401, 403, 406 or 429, or a bot-challenge page)
The headline rounds to a whole percent (37%); the exact share is 36.6% of the observed sample.
Methodology
How this was measured
Requested /llms.txt on each of the 41 public SEO and content-marketing tool vendor sites 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:Hand-curated 2026-09-04 from the vendors that recur across public "best SEO tools" listicles. Every URL is the vendor's own public homepage.
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.
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 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.
- 1 of the 42 listed URLs could not be reached or read on the day and were left out of the sample rather than counted either way.
- 1 of those refused our declared research crawler outright (HTTP 401, 403, 406 or 429, or a bot-challenge page), usually a CDN or firewall rule against bots.
- 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 public SEO and content-marketing tool vendor sites [Data set]. KinetixSEO crawl study, measured 1 November 2026, n = 41. https://kinetixseo.com/learn/studies/seo-tool-vendors-llms-txt
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 15 | 36.6% | n = 41 | 1 of 42 | |
| 15 | 35.7% | n = 42 | 0 of 42 |
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Where does your own site land?
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