How many large websites have an llms.txt?

By type of site

Type	Clear answers	Have an llms.txt
News	9	0
Software companies	14	10
Shopping	9	2
Reference and community	7	1
Developer tools	9	6

The file is a habit of companies whose customers are developers. That fits what it is useful for: giving a coding agent a clean map of documentation. Nothing here suggests publishers or shops see a reason to have one.

The files themselves

Site	Size	Links	Differs from the format in
stripe.com	68 KB	307	list lines that do not start with the link; more than 100 links
shopify.com	12 KB	74	Nothing
hubspot.com	35 KB	225	list lines that do not start with the link; more than 100 links
salesforce.com	781 KB	2,857	no single title line; no summary line; no link lists under sections; more than 100 links
notion.so	7 KB	48	no single title line
slack.com	40 KB	165	more than 100 links
atlassian.com	26 KB	105	more than 100 links
mailchimp.com	515 KB	984	no link lists under sections; list lines that do not start with the link; more than 100 links
zendesk.com	724 KB	3,133	no single title line; list lines that do not start with the link; more than 100 links
intercom.com	10 KB	67	list lines that do not start with the link; few notes on links
etsy.com	26 KB	76	no link lists under sections; list lines that do not start with the link
target.com	6 KB	54	Nothing
substack.com	19 KB	72	list lines that do not start with the link
github.com	28 KB	117	more than 100 links
vercel.com	5 KB	28	Nothing
cloudflare.com	17 KB	90	Nothing
digitalocean.com	12 KB	102	few notes on links; more than 100 links
netlify.com	3 KB	28	Nothing
supabase.com	3 KB	44	no summary line; few notes on links

Three things stand out.

Few follow the format. 5 of 19 pass every check in our llms.txt checker. The format asks for one title line, a summary, and sections of links; most files drop or bend at least one of those. Nobody is enforcing it, so a "valid" file is a courtesy.

Some have lost the point. The proposal exists so a tool with limited room can read a short list in place of a whole site. 9 of the 19 list more than 100 links, and 3 are over 100 KB. Those are sitemaps in Markdown.

Some are not lists at all. Two files are written as prose and headings: briefings for an assistant, with links inside sentences. They fail the format and may serve their purpose better than a tidy list.

How we ran this

• When and where. 2026-11-14, from a connection in Germany.
• What was fetched. One request for llms.txt per site, the www address first and then the bare domain. Links inside the files were not followed.
• What counts as having one. A 200 response that is text and not a web page. A 404, or an ordinary web page served at that address, counts as not having one.
• What was left out. 2 sites did not answer (washingtonpost.com, npr.org) and 10 turned the request away: reuters.com (401), wsj.com (403), bloomberg.com (403), theatlantic.com (403), canva.com (403), homedepot.com (403), medium.com (403), imdb.com (202), tripadvisor.com (403), npmjs.com (403). A refusal says nothing about whether the file exists, so those 12 are not in the percentages.
• How the files were checked. Against the format at llmstxt.org, with the same code as the checker. "More than 100 links" is our own threshold, not part of the format.

What this does not show

Whether any assistant reads these files. Having one and its being used are separate questions, and the only measurement we know of on the second, by Otterly, found AI crawlers fetched the file 84 times out of more than 62,100 visits to its test site.

The list is 60 large sites we chose, so the share describes this list. Frase found a higher figure in a different group: 58 of 93 B2B software vendors, checked on 9 October 2026, which fits our software row.

What to do with it

If your customers are developers, generate one and keep it short. If they are not, read this first: there are better uses of the same ten minutes.