Everyone is building llms.txt. Google says it ignores the file.

I built one for this site. I also read Google’s guidance on optimizing for generative AI features, which was last updated on 10 July 2026, and it lists llms.txt under the heading of things you can ignore. Google’s position is that it does not use these files at all, that creating one will neither help nor harm your visibility, and that it is fine to maintain one for other services that do read it.

So I keep mine, and I am honest with myself about why: it costs nothing, some non-Google systems may use it, and I am running this site as an experiment. What I will not do is sell it to anyone as an AI ranking tactic.

The uncomfortable part of the same document

The llms.txt line gets quoted because it is punchy. The more consequential lines are the ones about content. Google says structured data is not required for generative AI search and there is no special schema markup for it, though it remains worth doing for rich results. It says there is no need to chunk content into small pieces, no need to rewrite copy for machines, and that spinning up a page for every query variation runs into the scaled content abuse policy.

Read together, that removes most of what is being sold as AEO. What is left is the part that is hard: produce content that is not a commodity. Google’s own example contrasts a generic listicle with a first-hand account of a specific decision and what it cost. One of those can be generated by anyone. The other requires having done the thing.

Which is good news for catalog people

Product content is the most commoditized text on the internet. Manufacturer copy, syndicated identically to forty retailers, is the definition of content that could have come from anyone. The retailers who ranked for it were winning on domain authority, not on the words.

If the durable advantage is first-hand knowledge, then the merchandiser who knows why a filter is worded a certain way, and the catalog manager who knows what breaks when a vendor sends the wrong unit of measure, are sitting on the exact asset that is now scarce. It has just never been written down, because writing it down was never anyone’s job.

That is roughly why this site exists. Not to test a file format.

Reference: Google Search Central, Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search, last updated 10 July 2026.