Earlier this year, we published a post explaining why Slim SEO doesn't support llms.txt. Our reasoning was straightforward: it's not an industry standard, no major AI companies have adopted it, and traditional SEO best practices remain the most reliable path to visibility in AI-generated search results.
Since then, two significant developments have given us even stronger grounds for that position: Google officially addressed llms.txt in their documentation, and Ahrefs published hard data on how little these files are actually used.
What Google officially says now
In June 2026, Google published their official guide for optimizing for generative AI features on Google Search. Buried in a section titled "Mythbusting generative AI search: what you don't need to do" is this clear statement:
LLMS.txt files and other "special" markup: 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.
Doing so will neither harm nor help your site's visibility or rankings in Google Search, as Google Search ignores them.
This is as definitive as it gets. Google - the dominant force in both search and AI - is telling site owners they can skip llms.txt entirely. It won't hurt, but it absolutely won't help either.
What the data shows: Ahrefs's 137K domain study
Shortly after Google's announcement, Ahrefs published a large-scale study analyzing 137,210 domains. The numbers speak for themselves:
- 97% of llms.txt files received zero requests in May 2026. Not a single bot or human fetched them.
- Of the 3% that did get traffic, 96% came from bots - and most of those weren't even AI bots.
- AI search bots like OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, and Claude Web accounted for just 1.1% of total requests.
- Zero AI bots go looking for the file - when a file doesn't exist, no AI bot ever notices it's missing.
The only real readers of llms.txt? AI coding agents like Claude-Code, which made up about 10.5% of requests. This aligns with John Mueller's characterization of llms.txt as a "temporary crutch" for coding tools parsing developer documentation - useful if your site is API docs, irrelevant for virtually everything else.
Another telling figure: tools built specifically to audit and study llms.txt (12.1% of requests) generated more traffic than the AI tools actually consuming it.
The risks remain
Beyond the lack of adoption, llms.txt introduces real concerns. Ahrefs's research already detected a "prompt-injection-survey" crawler scanning llms.txt files - bad actors are studying how to exploit the trust that AI agents place in these files. And like any file you maintain, it's a ongoing commitment to keep it accurate, for an audience that largely doesn't exist yet.
What we recommend
Our advice hasn't changed. Google's own guidance confirms it: focus on foundational SEO.
What actually matters:
- Create unique, high-quality content that offers perspectives AI can't easily replicate - see our Writing Assistant docs for tools that help with content optimization
- Solid technical SEO - clear meta tags, breadcrumbs, proper redirection, and good site performance
- Use schema markup to help search engines understand your content - already proven to help with rich results
- Manage your internal links effectively with Slim SEO's Link Manager - it even suggests relevant links as you write
The bottom line
Since our first post on this topic, both Google and real-world data have confirmed our position. llms.txt isn't something most website owners need to worry about. If Google doesn't use it, 97% of files go unread, and AI search bots barely acknowledge its existence, there's little reason to invest time in it.
As we said before: we build Slim SEO to deliver results through proven SEO practices - and that's not changing.