B
Evidence Grade B
Graded
not independently verified
Safe to Cite
Current
97%
97% -- llms txt files with no crawler requests for llms.txt adoption / AI crawler behavior (2026)
Attribution:
View source
Lighthouse Research Team
Last verified:
·
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Source verified
Evidence graded
Value
97%
Unit
Percentage
Data Vintage
2026
Entity
Sample Size
100,000
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
75
Source Trust
90
Citation Chain
20
Independence
30
Methodology
45
Freshness
95
Source
Ahrefs
Primary
Tier B
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-cats-txt-showed-llms-txt-evidence-is-geo-astrology/584653/ ↗
Source Article
How Cats.txt Showed LLMs.txt Evidence Is GEO Astrology
The four arguments used to sell llms.txt would pass a text file about cats. Here's why that matters for every GEO tactic you're buying.
The post How Cats.txt Showed LLMs.txt Evidence Is GEO Astrology appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Original Research
Ahrefs
· Original study ↗
Methodology
Ahrefs study of 100,000 domains showing llms.txt files are largely ignored by AI crawlers; no measurable citation advantage found for sites with the file
Methodology documented
Segmentation
Industrymarketing
Cite this stat
Plain Text
llms.txt adoption / AI crawler behavior: 97% llms txt files with no crawler requests. Source: Ahrefs (2026). Via Lighthouse Intelligence -- https://lighthousedata.io/data/llms-txt-crawler-ignored-ahrefs-2026
HTML Embed
<blockquote cite="https://lighthousedata.io/data/llms-txt-crawler-ignored-ahrefs-2026" style="border-left:3px solid #2563eb;padding:12px 16px;margin:16px 0;font-family:system-ui,sans-serif;background:#f0f4ff;"><strong>97%</strong> -- llms txt files with no crawler requests for llms.txt adoption / AI crawler behavior<br><small>Source: Ahrefs (2026) · <a href="https://lighthousedata.io/data/llms-txt-crawler-ignored-ahrefs-2026" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Lighthouse Intelligence</a></small></blockquote>
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