WRENDA / FIELD NOTES

Numbers from the AI crawler edge.

Twice-weekly research on AI crawler accessibility, bot traffic, measurement, and the MCP / UCP protocols. Every post is grounded in fresh data.

MeasurementMay 7, 2026

70.6% of AI-Referred Clicks Land as "Direct" in GA4 — Here's How to Model What You're Missing

AI assistants strip referrer headers on the majority of outbound clicks. The result hides in your Direct channel. Server logs are the leading indicator that lets you recover the signal.

Crawler AccessibilityMay 7, 2026

llms.txt Adoption in 2025: 0% of the Top 1,000 Sites, ~10% of the Broader Web

A scan of the top 1,000 most-visited sites finds zero valid llms.txt files. A separate study of 300,000 domains puts adoption at ~10%. Here's what the data actually shows — and why the gap matters for AI crawler accessibility.