Pull Requests Adding llms.txt Files Grew 3.3 Times as a Share of GitHub Activity Between Late 2025 and Late 2026

Summary

Picture a software company's marketing lead who asks the developer team to 'add that AI file everyone talks about' to the docs site. The developer opens a branch called add-llms-txt, and the change is live within the hour. That small task is now happening in hundreds of projects.

llms.txt is a plain-text file that points AI tools to a site's most useful pages. Documentation teams were early adopters because AI coding assistants read docs constantly. The change usually arrives as a pull request on GitHub.

We counted 721 pull requests from llms.txt branches over the past year. Measured against all GitHub pull request activity, their rate grew 3.3 times between late 2025 and late 2026. Most get merged quickly.

What we measured

We used GH Archive, the public log of GitHub events, in Google BigQuery. Since October 2025, GH Archive's pull request records no longer include titles, but they still include the source branch name. We counted pull request events whose branch name contains llms.txt, llms-txt, llmstxt or llms-full.txt.

We counted opened and merged events by month and divided by all pull request events GH Archive recorded that month, because its capture varied a lot during 2026. Merge events appear in the data from December 2025. We paired opened and merged events for the same pull request to measure time to merge, and grouped repos by whether their name marks them as docs or website repos.

llms.txt pull requests keep gaining ground

Pull requests opened from llms.txt branches each month, and the rate per million recorded pull request events.

Raw counts fall in June to August 2026 because GH Archive captured far fewer events then. The per-million rate shows steady growth: 6.3 in Q4 2025, 12.1 in Q1 2026, 16.8 in Q2 and 20.6 in Q3.

Most llms.txt changes are merged within minutes

For 105 pull requests opened between December 2025 and August 2026, GH Archive recorded both the opening and the merge.

Adding llms.txt is a low-risk change, and some teams generate it automatically, which may be why it rarely waits long for review. Pairs are only counted when GH Archive captured both events, so slow merges may be underrepresented.

Docs repos are a fifth of the activity

We split repos by name and grouped branch names by intent.

Many code repos host their documentation in the same repository, so the docs share is a floor. One in six llms.txt pull requests fixes or updates an existing file, a sign that teams maintain it after the first version.

What this means

Software and documentation teams are treating llms.txt as routine housekeeping. It takes minutes to add and rarely meets resistance. For a business website the same logic applies: it is cheap, low risk and easy to keep updated if your platform can generate it.

Do not expect it to carry your AI visibility on its own, though. AI assistants still lean on your actual page content and what other sites say about you. Both get checked in a free AI visibility audit, plus your llms.txt file, so you can see which parts of LLM SEO actually need work.

Limits

Since October 2025 GH Archive does not include pull request titles, so we rely on branch names. Pull requests that add llms.txt from a branch with a different name are missed, so the true count is higher.

GH Archive captured far fewer events in May to August 2026 and had gaps in October 2025 and August to October 2026. We use per-million rates to compare periods.

Merge events appear in the data from December 2025. Time to merge is measured only where both events were captured, and some fast merges are automated.

Repo type comes from repository names, so docs hosted inside code repos are counted as code repos. We could not identify the documentation framework from the event data.

Frequently asked questions

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