Do AI bots use .txt, .md files in 2026

Yes. AI bots absolutely use .txt and .md files, and in many cases they prefer them.

Why AI bots like .txt and .md

AI crawlers (training bots, search bots, and answer-generation bots) are optimized for clean, low-noise text. Our logs show that search bots regularly request aeo.press .txt files. User-facing AI bots (e.g., chat-based retrieval) are much less likely to access .txt files directly, and more often rely on HTML files.

.txt (plain text) or .md (Markdown)

• Zero markup, zero styling
• Structured, but still clean
• Extremely easy to parse
• Very low crawl cost
• Ideal for:
  • robots.txt
  • llms.txt
  • training-friendly content

How AI bots actually use them

AI bots typically:

1. Discover.txt / .md files via:

   • Direct URLs
   • Sitemap.xml and robots.txt
   • References from HTML pages
   • Standard filenames (robots.txt, llms.txt, README.md)

2. Ingest them directly

   • No DOM rendering required
   • No JS execution
   • Faster + cheaper to crawl

3. Use them for

   • Training data
   • Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
   • Answer grounding / citation
   • Policy and instruction following

Why this matters for websites

If your goal is AI visibility / AEO:

• .txt and .md files are first-class inputs for LLMs
• .txt files are especially effective for crawler guidance and policy signaling
• .md files tend to perform better for content understanding and reuse

That’s why patterns like these are emerging:

/llms.txt
/ai.txt
/docs/.md
/ai/.md

They act like a clean API for AI, alongside your human-facing site.

Practical takeaway

• AI bots do use .txt
• AI bots do use .md
• Search bots favor .txt; user bots favor HTML content
• For best results, pair:
  • .txt → guidance, policy, canonical intent
  • .md → explanations, answers, documentation
  • HTML → human UX