Google’s Gary Illyes recently said that when it comes to ranking in AI Overviews, all you need to do is normal SEO. He also said that Google won’t be crawling and using the new LLMS.txt files that have become a popular topic in the SEO space.
He said this at Google’s own Search Central Deep Dive event in the Asia Pacific region yesterday.
Normal SEO for AI Overviews. Kenichi Suzuki was at the event and he posted on LinkedIn – “To get your content to appear in AI Overview, simply use normal SEO practices. You don’t need GEO, LLMO or anything else.”
This makes sense, in order for Google to get content for AI Overviews, they need to be crawled by Googlebot and indexed by Google Search. How Google Search normally ingests content, is how it also works for AI Overviews and AI Mode in Google. It also probably uses many forms of how Google ranks content within Google Search.
So do normal SEO if you want to appear in AI Overviews.
LLMS.txt not for Google. Kenichi Suzuki also posted on LinkedIn that during a Q&A session yesterday, Gary Illyes said Google won’t be crawling the LLMS.txt file. “Gary Illyes clearly stated that Google doesn’t support LLMs.txt and isn’t planning to,” Suzuki wrote.
That doesn’t mean that other AI engines won’t be doing that. Ray Martinez posted a screenshot of his log files showing how OpenAI is crawling his LLMS.txt file every 15 minutes or so. He posted this screenshot on X and wrote, “Log file analysis shows that OpenAI crawls my LLMs.txt file on a few sites. It’s pinging our servers every 15 minutes looking for freshness.”
This is all while John Mueller from Google said that no AI system is currently using the LLMS.txt file. I mean, that was weeks ago and things change fast in the AI world.
Why we care. When it comes to Google – it appears normal SEO is important. As Lily Ray wrote, AI search is booming, but SEO is still not dead. Do normal SEO to rank well within Google’s AI platforms, will those lead to clicks is another story.
And LLMS.txt is a topic we covered here a lot, and it seems Google won’t be using that text file any time soon.