1. llms.txt is already the majority, against the common impression
56 of 87 domains serve one. Public discussion still treats llms.txt as a curiosity; in the niche the engines actually cite, it is the dominant practice.
— STUDY · EPISODE 4
How many Romanian sites publish llms.txt — and does it matter?
Of the 87 Romanian domains that AI engines actually cite when answering Romanian-language questions, 56 publish an llms.txt file (64.4%), measured on 2026-08-09. The file is already the majority practice in this niche. It does not appear to be what earns the citations, though: the most-cited domain in the sample carries a plugin-generated llms.txt with none of the summary line the specification asks for.
· Dan Cristian Alexandrescu, Websem · ORCID
— THE NUMBERS
| Domains in frame | 87 |
|---|---|
| Publish llms.txt | 56 (64.4%) |
| — plugin-generated | 12 · mean 25,070 B |
| — hand-written | 44 · mean 8,803 B |
| Spec-conformant (H1 + summary) | 39 |
| With no curated link | 8 |
| Block answer-engine crawlers | 2 |
| Block training scrapers only | 1 |
— WHAT THE DATA SHOWS
2. The large files are plugin dumps, not curation
The 12 plugin-generated files average 25,070 bytes against 8,803 for the hand-written ones — nearly three times larger, with no H1 and none of the summary line the specification asks for. The largest in the sample, seo365.ro, runs to 68,722 bytes.
3. A site can cancel its own visibility from robots.txt
The distinction most often confused: blocking CCBot or Bytespider is a rights decision that does not remove you from answers. Blocking GPTBot, ClaudeBot or Google-Extended does, whatever you write in llms.txt.
- chatbotsite.ro — GPTBot, anthropic-ai · publishes llms.txt anyway
- canopy.ro — ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, GPTBot
— METHODOLOGY
The sampling frame. Not domains we picked, but the domains AI engines actually cite when answering Romanian-language questions about marketing, AEO and automation. The list comes from the sources cited in the answers monitored in LLM Pulse (project 3039, 25 prompts, 5 surfaces), filtered to Romanian-market domains. Inclusion rule: the domain appears among the 200 most-cited sources. That yields 87 domains.
The measurement. One GET to /llms.txt and one to /robots.txt per domain, on 2026-08-09, in a single complete run. A file counts as served if it answers 200, has content-type text/plain and exceeds 80 bytes — the threshold removes error pages returned with a 200 status. Conformance to the llmstxt.org specification is checked on two objective elements: the first line is a Markdown H1, and a blockquote carrying the summary appears within the first eight lines.
The two crawler categories. An agent counts as blocked only if robots.txt carries a block dedicated to it with "Disallow: /". Answer-engine crawlers: GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User, ClaudeBot, Claude-User, anthropic-ai, Google-Extended. Training or archive scrapers: CCBot, Bytespider, Applebot-Extended, Amazonbot, Meta-ExternalAgent, cohere-ai. The distinction is material: the first category decides whether you appear in answers, the second does not.
What the study does not measure. It does not establish a causal relation between llms.txt and citations. It shows a suggestive negative correlation — the most-cited domain has the least conformant file — but with 87 domains and a single run, the effect of llms.txt cannot be isolated from domain age, authority or content. Nor does it measure whether the bots read the file at all: that would need server logs, which we do not have for third-party domains.
Reproducibility. The scan is a script, and the figures on this page are generated from the raw data rather than typed: scripts/scan-llmstxt.py and scripts/build-llmstxt-study.mjs. The raw data is below, under CC BY 4.0.
— THE DATA, ROW BY ROW
| Domain | Bytes | Source | Spec | Links | Blocked bots |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| seo365.ro | 68,722 | hand | yes | 128 | — |
| smarters.ro | 61,922 | plugin | no | 275 | — |
| marketinglab.ro | 60,891 | plugin | no | 180 | — |
| limitless.ro | 48,212 | plugin | no | 164 | — |
| marketos.ro | 44,586 | plugin | no | 123 | — |
| snsys.ro | 38,956 | hand | yes | 149 | — |
| targetweb.ro | 32,376 | plugin | no | 83 | Bytespider |
| apexdigital.ro | 31,929 | hand | yes | 64 | — |
| websem.ro | 29,064 | hand | yes | 74 | — |
| vivinet.ro | 25,418 | plugin | no | 108 | — |
| dafe.ro | 21,312 | hand | yes | 51 | — |
| nextchapter.ro | 20,120 | hand | yes | 92 | — |
| digitalrocket.ro | 17,799 | hand | yes | 65 | — |
| dmaster.ro | 12,345 | hand | yes | 59 | — |
| ewdigital.ro | 11,453 | plugin | no | 44 | — |
| privatebrands.ro | 10,414 | hand | yes | 63 | — |
| mda-digital.com | 9,779 | hand | no | 0 | — |
| aifactory.ro | 8,965 | hand | no | 0 | — |
| seocherry.ro | 8,652 | plugin | no | 38 | — |
| sanbi.ai | 8,596 | hand | yes | 51 | — |
| goai.ro | 8,259 | hand | yes | 61 | — |
| automatizaricuai.ro | 6,197 | hand | yes | 17 | — |
| growwwise.com | 5,902 | hand | yes | 39 | — |
| difrnt.ro | 4,981 | hand | yes | 29 | — |
| creativdigital.ro | 4,756 | hand | yes | 32 | — |
| digitaliomarketing.ro | 4,432 | hand | yes | 18 | — |
| natix.ro | 4,211 | hand | yes | 21 | — |
| seozilla.ro | 4,168 | hand | yes | 0 | — |
| code24.ro | 4,018 | hand | yes | 19 | — |
| aysa.ro | 3,983 | hand | no | 0 | — |
| klain.ro | 3,773 | hand | yes | 40 | — |
| optimizareai.online | 3,541 | hand | yes | 24 | — |
| spacemedia.ro | 3,478 | hand | yes | 26 | — |
| marketiu.ro | 3,385 | hand | yes | 14 | — |
| groway.ro | 3,362 | hand | yes | 3 | — |
| sphinx-it.ro | 3,360 | hand | yes | 3 | — |
| themarkers.ro | 3,283 | hand | yes | 32 | — |
| nion.ro | 3,264 | hand | yes | 3 | — |
| geoflux.ai | 3,161 | hand | yes | 2 | — |
| chatbotsite.ro | 3,126 | hand | yes | 0 | GPTBot CCBot anthropic-ai Bytespider cohere-ai Meta-ExternalAgent |
| seo-ai.ro | 2,910 | plugin | no | 35 | — |
| digitalizare.ai | 2,893 | hand | no | 0 | — |
| automatizez.ro | 2,601 | hand | yes | 15 | — |
| dancovision.ro | 2,596 | hand | yes | 8 | — |
| aiautomatizari.ro | 2,595 | hand | yes | 13 | — |
| bluedotfusion.ro | 2,532 | hand | yes | 15 | — |
| arobsgrup.ro | 2,472 | plugin | no | 15 | — |
| outglow.ro | 2,241 | hand | yes | 6 | — |
| digitalcraft.ro | 2,004 | hand | yes | 16 | — |
| agentiadeai.ro | 1,821 | hand | yes | 11 | — |
| metaflow.ro | 1,631 | hand | yes | 8 | — |
| brandscan.ro | 1,486 | hand | yes | 0 | — |
| agentiegeo.ro | 1,316 | hand | no | 0 | — |
| mahucode.ro | 1,195 | plugin | no | 13 | — |
| nexaiagency.ro | 956 | hand | yes | 9 | — |
| fgd.ro | 749 | plugin | no | 5 | — |
| aiengineoptim.ro | — | — | — | — | — |
| upswing.ro | — | — | — | — | — |
| iagency.ro | — | — | — | — | — |
| iqads.ro | — | — | — | — | — |
| blogdigital.ro | — | — | — | — | — |
| aifrontdesk.ro | — | — | — | — | — |
| agentiiseo.ro | — | — | — | — | — |
| agentii-seo.ro | — | — | — | — | — |
| roweb.ro | — | — | — | — | — |
| dwf.ro | — | — | — | — | — |
| adsem.ro | — | — | — | — | — |
| pionmedia.ro | — | — | — | — | — |
| remotemarketing.ro | — | — | — | — | — |
| mindloop.ro | — | — | — | — | — |
| arcsoft.ro | — | — | — | — | — |
| apolloboostmedia.ro | — | — | — | — | — |
| gregoire.ro | — | — | — | — | — |
| ksd.ro | — | — | — | — | — |
| instapress.ro | — | — | — | — | — |
| sostenia.ro | — | — | — | — | — |
| start-seo.ro | — | — | — | — | — |
| seoagency.ro | — | — | — | — | — |
| flowmatic.ro | — | — | — | — | — |
| donamarketing.ro | — | — | — | — | — |
| daredigital.ro | — | — | — | — | — |
| autoads.ro | — | — | — | — | — |
| aientity.ro | — | — | — | — | — |
| cosmicweb.ro | — | — | — | — | — |
| ai4business.ro | — | — | — | — | — |
| canopy.ro | — | — | — | — | Amazonbot Applebot-Extended Bytespider CCBot ClaudeBot Google-Extended GPTBot Meta-ExternalAgent |
| gomag.ro | — | — | — | — | — |