Mintlify: agents request documentation twice as often as people
A documentation platform’s report for August 2026 - 257 million agent requests against 131 million human page loads. What it says about documentation and what it does not say about other sites
On September 16, 2026, Mintlify published a report on who reads documentation on its platform. The headline number: in August agents made almost twice as many requests as people.
The source is an interested party: Mintlify sells a documentation platform and creates files for agents itself. The numbers describe its customers, not the whole web.
What is in the report
| Measure | Value |
|---|---|
| Agent requests, August 2026 | 257 million |
| Human page loads, August 2026 | 131 million |
Share of agent requests through Markdown, llms.txt and skills | 83% |
The third row matters more than the first two. Most agent requests went not to regular HTML pages but along routes made for machines.
How to read it
Developer documentation is the first environment where the machine reader became the main one. The reason is clear: a developer works in an editor with an assistant, and the agent reads the documentation for them.
Here a file for agents is part of the product, not an experiment.
What the report does not show
- That shops, blogs and company sites look the same. In the logs of regular sites the picture is the opposite: according to Ahrefs, 97% of
llms.txtfiles were requested by nobody. - That agents come by themselves. In documentation, a person or a tool usually gives the agent the address.
- How requests are counted: one agent session can produce dozens of requests, while a person produces one page load.
What a site owner should do
Decide which environment the site belongs to. If it is documentation or help, Markdown versions and llms.txt are worth doing now: Markdown versions of pages. If it is a shop, start with page accessibility and product markup: A site ready for AI.