---
title: "How five llms.txt trackers reported five different adoption rates"
url: https://seomadman.com/reports/llms-txt-adoption-tracker-comparison
section: reports
published: 2026-07-08T00:00:00.000Z
modified: 2026-07-08T00:00:00.000Z
author: Adam Hafez
topics: ["AI search", "Technical SEO"]
---

# How five llms.txt trackers reported five different adoption rates

## The short answer

Five trackers published llms.txt adoption numbers in 2026, and none of them agree: Rankability found 8.7% of the top 1,000 sites, Ahrefs found 28% of its customer base, SE Ranking found 10.13% across 300,000 domains, and a Majestic Million scan found 7.4%. The gap is method, not disagreement about reality.

## Key takeaways

- Five independent trackers measured llms.txt adoption in 2026 and produced results between 7.4% and 28%, because none of them measured the same population.
- Rankability found 8.7% of the top 1,000 Tranco-ranked sites serve a valid file, rising to 15.8% among the 549 domains it could actually reach.
- Ahrefs found 28% adoption across 137,210 customer domains, but its own report cautions that Ahrefs Web Analytics customers skew more technical than the web at large.
- SE Ranking's scan of nearly 300,000 domains found 10.13% adoption and no measurable correlation between the file and AI citation frequency.
- Originality.ai's monitoring of over 3 million sites recorded an 8.8x rise in llms.txt files, from 4,088 in June 2025 to 36,120 by May 2026.

Ask five people what share of websites publish an llms.txt file and you get five numbers: 7.4%,
8.7%, 10.13%, 15.8%, 28%. None of them is wrong. Each one answers a different question - a
different population, crawled with a different definition of "has the file" - and treating any
one of them as *the* adoption rate is the actual error.

## Five counts, five populations

| Tracker | Population | What counted as adoption | Result |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Rankability | Top 1,000 sites by Tranco (traffic-based ranking), June 2026 list | HTTP 200 with plain-text content on `/llms.txt`; soft-404 HTML and empty bodies excluded | 8.7% (87/1,000); 15.8% among the 549 domains it could reach a verdict on |
| SE Ranking | Roughly 300,000 domains, selection criteria not published | File detected present; validity criteria not published | 10.13% |
| Ahrefs | 137,210 domains running Ahrefs Web Analytics or Bot Analytics | HTTP 200, confirmed via server logs as real Markdown rather than HTML | 28% (about 38,360 domains) |
| Chris Humphrey | Top 10,000 domains in the Majestic Million, June 2026 crawl | HTTP 200 and a genuine Markdown body; 313 of 1,050 200-responses were soft-404 HTML pages and excluded | 7.4% (737 sites); only 55% of those met the full recommended structure |
| Originality.ai | Continuous monitor of 3+ million sites | Not published in detail | Grew 8.8x, from 4,088 files in June 2025 to 36,120 in May 2026 |

## Why these numbers cannot be averaged together

**The populations barely overlap.** A traffic-ranked top 1,000 (Rankability), a link-graph-ranked
top 10,000 (Chris Humphrey), a 300,000-domain sample of unstated selection (SE Ranking), and one
vendor's own customer list (Ahrefs) are four different slices of the web, and only one of them -
Ahrefs - even claims to include mid-size sites that never heard of the spec. Ahrefs says so itself:
"Ahrefs Web Analytics customers skew more technical and SEO-aware than the web at large," and its
own report tells readers to treat the 28% figure as an upper bound, not a web-wide rate. That is
the most honest sentence in any of these five studies, and it is the reason Ahrefs' number is the
highest of the five by a wide margin.

**"Has llms.txt" is not one definition.** Rankability and Chris Humphrey both publish the detail
that matters most here: a plain HTTP 200 overcounts, because a large share of sites answer any
unknown path with a styled 404 page under a 200 status. Chris Humphrey's crawl hit exactly that -
1,050 domains returned 200 for `/llms.txt`, and 313 of them were soft 404s, not files. Only the
737 that remained after excluding those counted toward his 7.4%. SE Ranking and Originality.ai
report a number without publishing that filter, so their figures may or may not have the same
correction applied - there is no way to check from what they've published.

**The dates do not line up either.** Rankability's figure is a June 2026 Tranco list processed in
August 2026. Chris Humphrey's crawl ran in June 2026. Ahrefs' server-log analysis covers May 2026.
SE Ranking's study reads as late 2025. Originality.ai's 8.8x growth figure is the only one that
holds population and method constant across a full year, which is what makes it a trend line
rather than a single snapshot - the other four are four different snapshots of four different
things, not four points on the same curve.

## Why we care

**A single adoption percentage, quoted without its population and its definition, is not a
citable fact.** If a pitch or a deck says "X% of websites now have llms.txt," the next question is
always which tracker, which population, and which month - and, per this report, the honest
answer sometimes has to be "we don't know, because that tracker didn't publish it."

**The two most reusable numbers here are the two with published methodology you could rerun
yourself.** Rankability's soft-404 exclusion and reachable-subset breakdown, and Chris Humphrey's
Markdown-validation and quality-structure check, are the kind of disclosure that lets a reader
verify the claim instead of trusting the headline - which is the same bar this site holds its own
[reports](/reports) to.

**None of these five trackers measured whether llms.txt does anything.** Adoption is a count of
files on servers, not a signal that any answer engine reads. For that question, see our companion
piece on [who actually publishes llms.txt and why](/studies/llms-txt-adoption-2026) - the file's
audience problem is a separate finding from its adoption rate, and conflating the two is its own
common error in [AI search](/topics/ai-search) coverage this year.

## Frequently asked questions

### Which llms.txt adoption number should I quote?

None of them alone. Say which tracker, which population and which date range the number comes from, the way this report does, because "llms.txt adoption is X%" is not a complete claim on its own.

### Why do Ahrefs and Rankability disagree by 3x?

Different populations. Ahrefs measured its own Web Analytics customer base, which it explicitly flags as more technical than the average site; Rankability measured a traffic-ranked top 1,000 that includes sites with no reason to know llms.txt exists.

### Is any of this growth real, or just better measurement?

Originality.ai's 8.8x rise over twelve months, from 4,088 to 36,120 files across the same 3-million-site monitor, is the closest thing here to a real trend line, since it holds the population and method constant across the period rather than comparing two different trackers.

## Sources

1. [LLMS.txt Adoption: 8.7% of the Top 1,000](https://www.rankability.com/data/llms-txt-adoption/) - Rankability
2. [LLMs.txt: Why Brands Rely On It and Why It Doesn't Work](https://seranking.com/blog/llms-txt/) - SE Ranking
3. [We Analyzed 137K Sites: 97% of llms.txt Files Never Get Read](https://ahrefs.com/blog/llmstxt-study/) - Ahrefs
4. [llms.txt Adoption: Data From the Top 10,000 Sites](https://chrishumphrey.ai/research/state-of-llms-txt-2026) - Chris Humphrey (primary)
5. [LLMs.txt Tracking Study and Live Dashboard](https://originality.ai/blog/llms-txt-tracking-study) - Originality.ai