LintLab finds sitemap errors common, llms.txt adoption still rare
LintLab crawled the 1,000 most-visited sites on Chrome’s August 2026 top-sites list on Oct. 1, checking both XML sitemaps and llms.txt files, per PPC Land. Of the 400 sites with a sitemap, 62% carried at least one fault — most often redirecting URLs (23%) — while only 66 sites, 6.6%, served a valid llms.txt file and nearly two-thirds returned a 404. The llms.txt figure lines up with an Ahrefs study the wire covered in August, which found 97% of published llms.txt files go completely unread by AI crawlers regardless.
Why it matters: A third independent dataset — after Ahrefs and Common Crawl — shows llms.txt adoption still stuck in single digits, while the more basic problem of broken sitemaps remains unsolved across most of the open web.
The record: llms.txt
Glossary: AI crawlersllms.txt
Via PPC Land ↗
Posted to the wire October 2, 2026. Edited by Joe Balewski.