Why we do not sell llms.txt
Published . We will update this page, with the date, if the evidence changes.
What is actually known about llms.txt
- A log analysis of 137,000 domains found 97% of llms.txt files received zero requests.
- Google stated in the same month that the file has no effect on Search visibility.
Source: PPC Land, llms.txt adoption rises 8.8x but 97% of files get zero AI requests. May 2026.
A good idea that nothing reads
The proposal is reasonable on its face. A machine-readable manifest telling models what a site contains and how to treat it is exactly the kind of thing that ought to work, and it is modelled on robots.txt, which does.
The difference is adoption on the other side. robots.txt works because every crawler that matters reads it and honours it. llms.txt currently has no equivalent commitment from any major vendor, and the request logs bear that out: across 137,000 domains, 97% of these files were never fetched at all. A standard nothing reads is a proposal, not a standard.
It is sold anyway, and it is easy to see why. It is a discrete deliverable, it is quick to produce, it demonstrates familiarity with the category, and its ineffectiveness is almost impossible for a client to detect. Those are the properties of a good line item, not of good work.
The cost is not the file. It is what the file displaces. Every hour spent on a manifest nothing reads is an hour not spent on crawler directives that genuinely determine whether you appear in an answer, or on the third-party sources that carry most of the citations.
We publish one on this site because it takes almost no effort to be correct, and because we would rather be checkable than consistent with our own scepticism. If you open surge45.com/llms.txt, the file says the same thing this page does.
Four things that do measurably move AI visibility
Audit your crawler directives
Blocking a retrieval crawler removes you from assistant answers. Blocking a training crawler does not. This distinction is real, measurable, and misconfigured on a large share of SaaS sites.
Find out which domains own your category's citations
Measurable in an afternoon on Perplexity, where the source list is visible. It usually redirects the entire programme.
Fix the third-party listings you control
A stale G2 profile propagates into answers on every platform. Nobody sells this because it is unglamorous, and it is routinely the largest single accuracy failure we find.
Structure pages so an answer survives extraction
Retrieval selects passages, not pages. Answer the question in the opening passage, then qualify. This is real work and it has nothing to do with a manifest file.