LovedByAI

One of the biggest “best practices” in AI SEO right now is adding an llms.txt file.

So we checked whether AI crawlers actually use it.

Across ~1,600 sites and 82 million crawler requests, AI bots requested llms.txt just 31 times.

Meanwhile, they requested XML sitemaps 177,000+ times in a single month.

So my takeaway:

Create llms.txt because it’s cheap. But don’t mistake “easy to implement” for “important.”

For SMBs, the bigger things still seem to be crawlability, clean site structure, sitemaps, and content AI can actually understand.

We published the full data here:
https://www.lovedby.ai/blog/llms-txt