# AEO Adoption Scan, 2026 > What 93 pages ranking for AEO and GEO queries actually ship: llms.txt, JSON-LD, FAQPage, markdown variants and AI-bot blocks, measured August 2026. **Canonical:** https://alexturik.com/aeo/research-2026 Seven queries, 93 pages, nine signals, one day in August 2026. The method, the full results, and what the numbers cannot tell you — so the articles that quote them do not each carry their own copy. Three articles on this site quote numbers from one scan. This is the scan: what was collected, how each signal was defined, what came out, and what the numbers cannot tell you. If you want to cite a figure, cite this page — the articles link here rather than repeating the method. ## What was measured On 9 August 2026 I pulled the top 20 United States, English-language Google organic results for seven queries, using the DataForSEO SERP API: `llms.txt` · `answer engine optimization` · `generative engine optimization` · `how to get cited by ai` · `geo vs seo` · `aeo vs seo` · `ai visibility checker` That returned 123 URLs. 117 answered with a `200`. After dropping platform domains — YouTube, Reddit, LinkedIn, Instagram, Medium, Wikipedia and X, none of which control their own head markup in a way that means anything here — **93 pages across 78 domains** remained. Every number below is out of those 93 unless it says otherwise. These are pages that already rank for the queries where AEO is discussed. That makes them a useful sample of what the field practises, and a poor sample of the web at large. ## How each signal was defined A number is only as good as the check behind it, so here are the checks. | Signal | Counted when | |---|---| | `llms_txt` | `GET /llms.txt` returns 200 with a non-HTML content type | | `ai_bot_blocked` | robots.txt has a named group for the bot containing `Disallow: /` | | `faqpage` | `@type FAQPage` appears in any JSON-LD block on the ranking URL | | `md_variant` | `GET .md` returns 200 with a markdown content type | | `question_heading` | an `h2` or `h3` whose text ends with `?` | Everything else is a plain presence check on the fetched HTML: a JSON-LD block, a `dateModified` field, an `author` field, a ``. ## Results | Signal | Pages | Share | |---|---|---| | JSON-LD of any type | 76 / 93 | 81.7% | | `dateModified` present | 55 / 93 | 59.1% | | `author` in JSON-LD | 58 / 93 | 62.4% | | At least one question heading | 69 / 93 | 74.2% | | `llms.txt` served | 49 / 93 | 52.7% | | At least one comparison table | 34 / 93 | 36.6% | | `FAQPage` markup | 24 / 93 | 25.8% | | Markdown variant of the page | 8 / 93 | 8.6% | | Blocks at least one AI bot | 8 / 93 | 8.6% | | `HowTo` markup | 3 / 93 | 3.2% | Two figures are not page counts. Across all 2,195 headings in the sample, **410 end in a question mark — 18.7%**. And the **median page runs 2,511 words**. The shape of that table is the finding. The signals that a CMS or an SEO plugin emits without being asked — JSON-LD, `dateModified`, an author field — clear 59%. The signals that require someone to decide something — a markdown variant, `HowTo`, a comparison table — sit under 37%. `llms.txt` is the interesting middle at 52.7%, and the next section is why that number is softer than it looks. ## The llms.txt number has a footnote 41 of the 78 domains serve a working file. The sizes are not comparable to each other in any useful way: | | Bytes | Domain | |---|---|---| | Smallest | 648 | llmstxt.org — the site that publishes the specification | | Median | 8,072 | — | | Largest | 2,500,078 | coursera.org | A 2.5 MB file is not a curated index. It is an export, and an agent reading it will truncate long before the end. More to the point: **5 of the 41 domains, 12.2%, got the file from an SEO plugin update rather than a decision.** | Domain | Plugin | |---|---| | aioseo.com | All in One SEO Pro v5 | | visiblefactors.com | All in One SEO Pro v5 | | www.fasturtle.com | All in One SEO v5 | | www.boralagency.com | Yoast SEO v27 | | www.yoghurtdigital.com | Yoast SEO v27 | Those five sites did not choose a curation strategy. Their plugin shipped a feature. They are in every llms.txt adoption statistic published after that release, including this one. ## Who blocks AI bots Eight of 93 pages sit on a domain that blocks at least one AI crawler outright. Six of them are worth naming, because what they block is informative: | Domain | Ranks for | Blocks | |---|---|---| | forbes.com | answer engine optimization (#4) | GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, CCBot, Bytespider, Applebot-Extended, anthropic-ai, meta-externalagent | | builtin.com | generative engine optimization (#19) | GPTBot, ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot | | lib.guides.umd.edu | how to get cited by ai (#8) | GPTBot, ChatGPT-User, CCBot, Bytespider, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended | | libguides.brown.edu | how to get cited by ai (#16) | GPTBot, ChatGPT-User, CCBot, Bytespider, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended | | llmclicks.ai | ai visibility checker (#19) | CCBot, Bytespider, meta-externalagent | | coursera.org | answer engine optimization (#6) | meta-externalagent | Two university library guides ranking for "how to get cited by ai" block the crawlers that would cite them. Forbes blocks `anthropic-ai`, a token Anthropic has retired, which tells you when that file was last opened. ## What this does not show - **It measures presence, not effect.** Nothing here says a page with `llms.txt` gets cited more often. Testing that needs citation data these checks do not collect. - **The sample is self-selected.** Pages that rank for "answer engine optimization" are written by people who think about AEO. Treat every number as an upper bound for the wider web. - **One country, one language, one day.** US, English, 9 August 2026. Google results move. - **Presence is not correctness.** A `FAQPage` block counts here whether or not its answers match the visible text. So does an `llms.txt` that lists dead URLs. - **93 is small.** A five-point difference between two signals in this sample is noise. ## The baseline: this site, on the day of the scan The same run measured alexturik.com, which is how the gaps got prioritised. This is the state on 9 August 2026, before any of it was addressed: | | This site, 2026-08-09 | Sample median or share | |---|---|---| | Median words per post | 1,383 | 2,511 | | Question headings | 7 / 130 (5.4%) | 18.7% | | Pages with `FAQPage` | 3 / 22 (all under /plugins, none in the blog) | 25.8% | | Markdown variants | 15 pages | 8.6% of the sample had any | | AI bots blocked | 0 | 8.6% blocked at least one | | `llms.txt` | 10,750 bytes | median 8,072 | Those figures are deliberately frozen at the scan date and are no longer current — the blog now runs FAQ markup and question headings throughout, and every page has a markdown twin. Rerunning the scan is the only honest way to update them, which is the point of writing the method down. ## How to cite this > Turovskyi, O. (2026). *AEO Adoption Scan, 2026: 93 pages ranking for AEO and GEO queries.* alexturik.com/aeo/research-2026. Measured 9 August 2026. The raw dataset is in the repository as `docs/reports/aeo-adoption-dataset-2026-08-09.json`. If you rerun the same seven queries, I would like to see the numbers.