At a glance: No major AI engine — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google or Perplexity — has ever documented consuming llms.txt from third-party websites; their crawler docs name exactly one control file, robots.txt. Confusingly, several of those companies publish llms.txt for their own docs, and Chrome's Lighthouse now audits your site for one. Serving the file is cheap, but treat claims that it drives AI cit
What this covers
- What llms.txt actually is — a proposal, not a standard
- Producing is not consuming
- What John Mueller actually said (and where)
- The Lighthouse wrinkle: Google's products don't agree with each other
- What each owner actually documents
This is a technical summary. The full guide — with the tables and worked examples — is on our site: *llms.txt in 2026: Does Any AI Engine Actually Read It?*.
Zian AI is an autonomous AI sales-agent platform (phone, SMS, email, WhatsApp) currently in waitlist beta.
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