# Is llms.txt a standard? Status of the proposal > What llms.txt is in 2026: a proposal and its v2, who publishes the file, what Lighthouse checks, what is known about its effect on search, and what remains open Page: https://llms-full-txt.ru/en/guides/standard-status/ Site index: https://llms-full-txt.ru/en/llms.txt :::note[Date checked] The facts on this page were checked against primary sources on October 3, 2026. ::: ## In short - `llms.txt` is a proposal by a single author, not an IETF or W3C standard. - v2 was published on August 10, 2026. - Documentation platforms and AI companies publish the file at scale, for their own developers. - There is no evidence that the file improves search rankings or citation frequency. - No bot owner states that its bot reads other sites' `/llms.txt`. ## What its status is Jeremy Howard (Answer.AI) published the proposal on September 3, 2024. No formal process stands behind it: no working group, no RFC. The text and the discussions live in the [AnswerDotAI/llms-txt](https://github.com/AnswerDotAI/llms-txt) repository. That is why this site says "proposal" or "proposed standard" rather than just "standard". As of October 3, 2026 the repository has 2,643 stars and 108 open issues. The license is Apache-2.0. ## Timeline | Date | Event | |---|---| | 2024-09-03 | v1 of the proposal | | 2026-05-01 | the `llms.txt` audit is added in Lighthouse 13.2.0 | | 2026-05-07 | the audit is on by default in [Lighthouse 13.3.0](https://github.com/GoogleChrome/lighthouse/releases/tag/v13.3.0) | | 2026-08-10 | v2 of the proposal | What changed in v2 is on the [Changes in v2](https://llms-full-txt.ru/en/specification/changes/) page. ## Who publishes the file We checked 46 sites by requesting `/llms.txt` on October 3, 2026. **Publish it:** OpenAI, Anthropic, Cloudflare, Vercel, Stripe, Supabase, GitHub, Cursor, Perplexity, LangChain, Docker, React, Vue, Svelte, Shopify, Yoast, Wix, Gravity UI, Yandex Cloud. **Generate it automatically:** the documentation platforms Mintlify and GitBook, the Yoast SEO and AIOSEO plugins for WordPress, the Wix site builder. **Do not publish it (404):** docs.astro.build, MDN, the Hugging Face root, developer.chrome.com, web.dev, Tailwind, [Ahrefs](https://ahrefs.com/blog/llmstxt-study), Moz, habr.com, Tilda, 1C-Bitrix. The list changes. Older roundups, including the previous version of this page, name sites that have no file. ### How many sites | Source | What was measured | Result | |---|---|---| | HTTP Archive, [Web Almanac 2025](https://almanac.httparchive.org/en/2025/seo) | share of sites with the file | 2.1% | | [Common Crawl](https://commoncrawl.org/blog), August 2026 | files found | 584,107 | | Common Crawl, same analysis | created by a generator | 68% | | Common Crawl, same analysis | hosted on Wix | 41% | | Common Crawl, same analysis | without a single link | 23% | Most files are generated automatically rather than written by the site owner. The number of files says little about how many people made a deliberate decision. ## Lighthouse The full story of the audit: [Lighthouse and llms.txt](https://llms-full-txt.ru/en/guides/lighthouse/). Lighthouse has an audit for the presence of `llms.txt`. It belongs to the experimental Agentic Browsing category. - Only the availability of the file is checked. The content is not evaluated. - The category has no 0-100 score. - If the file answers 404, the audit is reported as not applicable rather than failed. :::caution[What this does not prove] The Lighthouse audit does not mean that Google Search uses `llms.txt`. [Google's documentation](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/ai-optimization-guide) for site owners says the opposite: Search does not use such files. ::: ## Does it work ### What is confirmed - Coding agents request documentation through `llms.txt` and Markdown versions of pages. Documentation platforms report this; they also have a stake in the subject. - AI companies publish such files for their own documentation. So the format is considered useful for developer tasks. ### What is not confirmed - **Effect on citations.** [SE Ranking](https://seranking.com/blog/llms-txt/) studied 300,000 domains and found no relationship between having the file and citation frequency in AI answers. - **Requests for the file.** Ahrefs studied 137,000 domains: 97% of the files were never requested. - **Search bots reading the file.** Neither OpenAI, Anthropic, Google nor Perplexity state that their bots read other sites' `/llms.txt`. ### What this means `llms.txt` is an interface to documentation and content for agents. As a lever for search visibility it is unconfirmed. A promise of higher rankings or more citations from the file alone has no evidence behind it. ## Open questions The proposal repository is discussing: - which language the root file of a multilingual site should use; - which `Content-Type` to serve; - a section on security and untrusted content; - signing and provenance of the file; - what to do when `/llms.txt` answers 200 with an HTML page. The last one is not hypothetical. In the Common Crawl corpus, 40% of successful responses to `/llms.txt` were HTML. ## Should you publish one **Yes, if** you have documentation, an API, a reference or other material that agents and AI assistants in code editors work with. The cost is low, and many platforms generate the file for you. **Not for this reason**, if the only goal is search rankings or mentions in AI answers. There is no data showing the file affects them. **In any case:** the file does not control access. Rules for bots belong in `robots.txt` - see [AI crawlers and robots.txt](https://llms-full-txt.ru/en/guides/ai-crawlers/).