OtterlyAI: /llms.txt sees 0.1% of AI-bot traffic — performs worse than average content page

Claim: OtterlyAI's 90-day measurement reported 84 of 62,100 AI-bot requests (0.1%) targeted /llms.txt files — worse than an average content page on the same domains.

Source: Kai Spriestersbach, "The llms.txt is dead," Medium.

Confidence: Single-source. Corroborated qualitatively by reports that Google added llms.txt to its docs in December 2024 then removed them within 24 hours.

Background: The /llms.txt proposal was published by Jeremy Howard (Answer.AI) on September 3, 2024 — a curated Markdown file at the website root specifically for LLM retrieval. https://answer.ai/posts/2024-09-03-llmstxt.html. Mintlify rolled it out across all hosted docs sites in Nov 2024 making thousands of sites llms.txt-aware "practically overnight."

Implication for Candid: Don't ship llms.txt as a citation strategy. If you ship it at all, ship it as a courtesy — the durable value is structured content on the actual pages, not the index file. Brief 3 explicitly recommends acknowledging this skepticism early to "inoculate against trend-chasing."