B
Evidence Grade B
Graded
accuracy verified by the review judge
Safe to Cite
Current
11%
11% -- ai user agent robots txt adoption rate for Fortune 500 companies (2026-03)
11% of Fortune 500 companies have named at least one AI user agent directive in their robots.txt file.
Attribution:
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Lighthouse Research Team
Last verified:
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Source verified
Evidence graded
Value
11%
Unit
Percentage
Data Vintage
2026-03
Entity
Sample Size
500
Evidence Quality
B
Strong, reliable evidence
Sourced from a well-regarded research firm or industry leader with transparent methodology and a reasonably large sample.
Single source - not yet corroborated
Score breakdown
Extraction
95
Source Trust
60
Citation Chain
20
Independence
30
Methodology
45
Freshness
95
Source
ProGEO.ai
Primary
Tier A
https://www.progeo.ai/research/generative-engine-optimization-signals-q1-2026 ↗
Source Article
Signaling the Shift to Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) — ProGEO.ai - Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
Signaling the Shift to Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
Key findings — Fortune 500 adoption rates of robots.txt, JSON-LD, and llms.txt
As of March 2026, ProGEO.ai research found:
92.8% (n=464) of the Fortune 500 have implemented robots.txt.
Only 11% (n=55) of the Fortune 500 have named an AI use…
Original Research
ProGEO.ai
· Original study ↗
Methodology
n=55 companies named at least one AI user agent directive in robots.txt
Methodology documented
Segmentation
Industrymarketing
Cite this stat
Plain Text
Fortune 500 companies: 11% ai user agent robots txt adoption rate. Source: ProGEO.ai (2026-03). Via Lighthouse Intelligence -- https://lighthousedata.io/data/fortune500-ai-user-agent-robots-txt-2026
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<blockquote cite="https://lighthousedata.io/data/fortune500-ai-user-agent-robots-txt-2026" style="border-left:3px solid #2563eb;padding:12px 16px;margin:16px 0;font-family:system-ui,sans-serif;background:#f0f4ff;"><strong>11%</strong> -- ai user agent robots txt adoption rate for Fortune 500 companies<br><small>Source: ProGEO.ai (2026-03) · <a href="https://lighthousedata.io/data/fortune500-ai-user-agent-robots-txt-2026" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Lighthouse Intelligence</a></small></blockquote>
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