B Evidence Grade B Graded accuracy verified by the review judge Safe to Cite Current

1.1%

1.1% -- retrieval bot share of llms txt requests for Retrieval bots (PerplexityBot, OAI-SearchBot) (2026-05)

Name: Retrieval Bot Share Of Llms Txt Requests Statistics
Creator: Lighthouse Intelligence
Published: 2026-09-30

2026-05 · n=137,210 · Ahrefs

Retrieval bots such as PerplexityBot and OAI-SearchBot accounted for around 1.1% of requests received by llms.txt files in May 2026.

97% of llms.txt files analyzed received no traffic at all during the study period
value is described as approximately 1.1%

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Attribution: Ahrefs View source

Lighthouse Research Team

Last verified: 2026-09-30 · How we verify data →

Source verified Evidence graded

Value

1.1%

Unit

Percentage

Data Vintage

2026-05

Entity

Retrieval bots (PerplexityBot, OAI-SearchBot)

Sample Size

137,210

Evidence Quality

Strong, reliable evidence

Sourced from a well-regarded research firm or industry leader with transparent methodology and a reasonably large sample.

61/100 confidence

Single source - not yet corroborated

Score breakdown

Extraction

Source Trust

Citation Chain

Independence

Methodology

Freshness

Source

Ahrefs Primary Tier B

https://www.anglera.com/glossary/llms-full-txt ↗

Confidence: 53/100 Vintage: 2026-05 Channel: Common Crawl

Source Article

llms

Original Research

Ahrefs · Original study ↗

Methodology

Ahrefs analysis of llms.txt file traffic

Methodology documented

Segmentation

Industrymarketing

Cite this stat

Plain Text

Retrieval bots (PerplexityBot, OAI-SearchBot): 1.1% retrieval bot share of llms txt requests. Source: Ahrefs (2026-05). Via Lighthouse Intelligence -- https://lighthousedata.io/data/retrieval-bot-request-share-2026

HTML Embed

<blockquote cite="https://lighthousedata.io/data/retrieval-bot-request-share-2026" style="border-left:3px solid #2563eb;padding:12px 16px;margin:16px 0;font-family:system-ui,sans-serif;background:#f0f4ff;"><strong>1.1%</strong> -- retrieval bot share of llms txt requests for Retrieval bots (PerplexityBot, OAI-SearchBot)<br><small>Source: Ahrefs (2026-05) · <a href="https://lighthousedata.io/data/retrieval-bot-request-share-2026" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Lighthouse Intelligence</a></small></blockquote>

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