# Why the blog does not ship llms.txt

Source: https://docs.agentblog.dev/concepts/why-no-llms-txt
Summary: The evidence against llms.txt for content sites, the one case where it genuinely helps, and why these docs serve one while your blog will not.



The blog ships no `llms.txt`. Not as an option, not behind a flag. This
documentation site does serve one, at [/llms.txt](/llms.txt), and the difference
between those two situations is the whole point.

## The evidence [#the-evidence]

* **Gary Illyes, Google Search Central Deep Dive, July 2025:** Google does not
  support `llms.txt` and is not planning to.
* **John Mueller** compared it on the record to the discredited keywords meta
  tag.
* **Google's own AI optimization guide:** "You don't need to create new machine
  readable files, AI text files, markup, or Markdown to appear in Google Search
  (including its generative AI capabilities), as Google Search itself doesn't
  use them." The same page adds that maintaining one for other services will
  neither harm nor help visibility, because Google Search ignores it.
* **No major model provider consumes it in production.**
* **An SE Ranking study** found that removing `llms.txt` as a variable improved
  their citation-prediction model, meaning it was adding noise.
* **OtterlyAI instrumented one site for 90 days** and logged 84 requests to
  `/llms.txt` out of 62,100 AI bot visits. An ordinary page on the same site
  averaged about 265 AI bot visits in the same window.

That last measurement is the one worth sitting with. The file that exists to be
read by AI crawlers was fetched roughly a third as often as a random page that
was not written for them at all.

A larger figure circulates, 408 requests out of more than 500 million AI bot
visits. It is not used here: it comes from a vendor with no published
methodology, no data window, and no dataset, and a number that convenient
deserves the same scrutiny as the claim it argues against.

## The cost is not the file [#the-cost-is-not-the-file]

`llms.txt` neither helps nor hurts your search performance. The cost of shipping
one is the implication. A blog that ships an `llms.txt` is telling its owner
that the file does something, and that owner will spend an hour maintaining it
that belongs somewhere else.

## The one case where it earns its place [#the-one-case-where-it-earns-its-place]

Developer documentation with programmatic readers, where the token saving is
real.

The mechanism is different from the citation claim. Nobody is arguing that a
crawler discovers your docs through `llms.txt`. The argument is that when an
agent has already been pointed at a documentation site and has to read it, a
Markdown index and Markdown page variants cost a fraction of the tokens that
rendered HTML with navigation chrome costs. That is a measurable saving on a
real workflow rather than a ranking hypothesis.

Next.js does exactly this for its own documentation, and so does this site:

* [/llms.txt](/llms.txt), an index of every page with its description
* [/llms-full.txt](/llms-full.txt), every page concatenated
* A Markdown variant of every page, at [/installation.md](/installation.md) and
  so on for the rest

Your blog is not that. Its readers are people, plus crawlers that want HTML with
structured data in it. Serving those crawlers a second parallel copy of the same
content adds a surface to keep in step and buys nothing measurable.

## What to do with the hour instead [#what-to-do-with-the-hour-instead]

1. **Server-rendered HTML.** The text in the first response, with no JavaScript
   required. This is the whole game, and most sites fail it.
2. **Structured data.** A connected graph that resolves your author and your
   organisation to real entities.
3. **Third-party mentions.** Being discussed somewhere you do not control is
   closer to the mechanism than anything you can put in your own root directory.

AgentBlog does the first two for you and tells you how to work on the third.
`llms.txt` is not on the list.

## If you want one anyway [#if-you-want-one-anyway]

It is your repository. A route handler at `app/llms.txt/route.ts` returning a
plain-text index is about fifteen lines, and nothing in the blog will fight you.

It is not shipped by default because shipping it implies it works.

***

*This page is licensed [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).*