Original Summary

I've lost count of the llms.txt threads here. Every few weeks there's a new study and it says something a bit different. SE Ranking looked at around 300k domains and found no link between having the file and getting cited in AI answers. Ahrefs looked at 137k sites and 97% of the files never got a single request. Then you have people saying it helps agents and coding tools get around docs, which is fair for that use case. And a third camp saying skip it, it's the meta keywords tag all over again. Mueller made that exact comparison. Honestly they can all be right at the same time. I still think it's a no brainer to have one. First, it doesn't hurt. Google wrote it down in June: keeping an llms.txt won't help or harm your visibility in Search, because Search ignores it. So Google itself is telling you the downside is zero. Second, it's fast. It's one small text file. If you know your own site, it takes less time than reading the next study about it. And the part that made me stop hesitating. Since Lighthouse 13.3 in May, the default report has an Agentic Browsing section and one of the checks is llms.txt. It shows up in PageSpeed Insights now too. To be fair, not having it isn't a fail. You get N/A, and the Chrome docs say the file is "optional at the moment". "At the moment" is doing a lot of work in that sentence though. Nobody knows if this audit stays or gets dropped next year. I just think when Google puts something in its own audit tool, following it is the cheap bet. Google has shaped how the web gets built for 20 years, whether we like it or not. I'm not saying it'll move your AI visibility. Nothing in the data says it will. I'm saying it costs nothing, Google's tooling checks for it, and the hours spent arguing about it would be better spent elsewhere. Is there an actual argument against having one that I'm missing?   submitted by   /u/side-labs [link]   [comments]

  • 情报分类：商业与市场研究
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  • 信息来源：Reddit · SaaS
  • 发布时间：2026/10/14 14:34:32