83.1% of the GitHub Projects Built Around llms.txt Never Earned a Single Recorded Star

Summary

Picture a dental practice owner who hears that adding an llms.txt file will help ChatGPT find the business. A developer searches GitHub for a tool and finds dozens of options. Most of them have no stars, no updates and no users. That is the normal state of llms.txt tooling.

llms.txt is a proposed plain-text file that sits at the root of a website and points AI systems to the pages that matter. It was proposed in September 2024. Since then developers have built generators, plugins for documentation tools, directories and checkers around it.

We counted 668 original repositories with llms.txt in their name. 555 of them (83.1%) never received a single recorded star. The developer interest is real but narrow. A handful of projects get almost all the attention.

What we measured

We used GH Archive, the public record of GitHub events, in Google BigQuery. We scanned every event from January 2023 to October 20, 2026 and kept repositories whose name contains llms.txt, llms-txt, llmstxt or llms-full.txt. A repo's first event date stands in for its creation date. We dropped repos whose short name matched an earlier repo that had been forked and that had no forks and at most two stars of their own, because those are most likely forks.

Stars are WatchEvents and forks are ForkEvents recorded by GH Archive. We sorted repos into five groups by keywords in their names: framework plugin or integration, generator or converter, directory or checker, MCP server, and everything else. To compare years fairly we divided llms.txt stars by all stars GH Archive recorded that year.

New llms.txt repos held at 80 to 110 a quarter from spring 2025 to mid 2026

The proposal went live in September 2024. Repos followed within weeks, and the pace held fairly steady from spring 2025 to mid 2026. The lower Q3 2026 count falls partly in a gap in GH Archive's records.

New projects keep appearing, but fewer of them earn any stars. In Q1 2025, 30 of 71 new repos (42.3%) got at least one star. In Q2 2026 it was 5 of 110 (4.5%). Part of that drop comes from lower star capture in GH Archive during 2026, so treat the late figures as a floor.

Nearly half of all llms.txt repos are one-off site files

We grouped repos by what their names say they do.

Plugins for documentation tools are the most durable group. 20 of 109 (18.3%) were updated in three or more months, against 9.9% for llms.txt repos overall. The 'other' group's star total is high because it includes the original proposal repo.

Developer attention spiked in 2025, then cooled

Raw star counts mislead here because GH Archive recorded far fewer stars in 2026. So we compared llms.txt stars with all recorded stars in the same year.

Interest grew nearly tenfold from 2024 to 2025. In 2026 the share fell by roughly 60%. The standard did not disappear, but the early rush of new tools has settled. Among named projects, the proposal repo from Answer.AI leads with 1,623 recorded stars, followed by two Firecrawl generators with 408 and 153.

What this means

If someone tells you llms.txt is an industry standard, the GitHub record says otherwise. A small number of tools and documentation plugins carry the whole effort. Most repos are one-off files that nobody else uses. Adding the file is cheap, so it is reasonable to have one, but it will not do much on its own. Treat it as a small extra in SEO for AI search, not the plan itself.

What AI assistants actually quote is the content on your pages, plus how clearly your business is described across the web. Start there. Our free AI visibility audit shows where your business shows up in AI answers today, which is a better measure of LLM SEO than whether a file exists.

Limits

We matched repo names only. Repos that build llms.txt files but do not say so in their name are missed, and a few name matches may be unrelated.

GH Archive event payloads stopped including repo descriptions for new repos after October 8, 2025, so we could not classify by description or language. Programming language data is not in the event stream, so we do not report it.

First seen is the first public event we recorded, not the true creation date. Fork detection is a heuristic based on matching names.

GH Archive recorded far fewer star events in 2026 (11.5 million through October 20, against 74.5 million in 2024). Star totals for 2026 understate real activity. Event capture also had gaps in October 2025 and August to October 2026.

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