Google Can't Afford To Say Yes

Google says it does not read llms.txt, and has no plans to start. Not “we’re evaluating it.” A flat no.

I believe them. And I have seen this movie before.

Plain words first, because this only matters if it’s clear. An llms.txt page is a simple text page a business publishes so AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity can read what the business actually does: services, prices, hours, location. No menus, no popups, no scripts. It’s the page you write for the machines, because the machines are increasingly doing the first pass of the shopping.

The standard is young. It shipped its first major update on August 10, and Ahrefs found 97% of these pages got zero requests in May. So I can hear it already: “It’s dead! Nobody reads it! Even Google says skip it!”

Hold on. Watch what Google does, not what Google says. Google already ran this exact play once.

In May 2023, AI answers in Google search were an experiment you had to go turn on in a lab setting. One year later, Google conceded and made the AI Overview the default for everyone.

Then the clicks went. Pew Research tracked 68,879 real searches: when an AI summary appears, people click a result 8% of the time, versus 15% without one. Sessions end right at the summary 26% of the time.

Google’s official position on all of this? Clicks are “relatively stable.”

The behavior is the admission.

Here is the detail most people miss. Google’s search ad revenue did not fall while those clicks collapsed. It grew 17% last quarter. How? Google moved the ads inside the AI summary. The websites below the summary lost the traffic. Google kept the money.

The answer box itself now has a for-sale section. When Google can place a paying advertiser inside the AI answer, that surface is not neutral ground. It is inventory.

THE FIELD NOTE

Google does not oppose AI answers. Google opposes AI answers on surfaces it cannot sell ads on. The day Google found the ad slot inside the AI summary, the resistance ended and the feature went default.

Here’s the part that gave me the whole thesis. Google Search’s own optimization guide says an llms.txt file “will neither harm nor help your site’s visibility or rankings in Google Search, as Google Search ignores them.” Fair enough. That was June.

A month earlier, in May, Google Chrome shipped a new Lighthouse audit that checks whether your site has an llms.txt file. Chrome’s reason, in Google’s words: “Without this file, agents may spend more time crawling the site to understand its high-level structure and primary content.”

Both statements can be true at the same time. One is about search rankings. The other is about AI agents reading your site. That’s the point. The dividing line inside Google runs exactly where the ad money is. The team that sells search ads says skip it. The team that doesn’t sell search ads says it helps.

Now look at llms.txt through that lens.

An AI reads your llms.txt page directly and hands the user the answer. That transaction happens on your website and inside the AI tool. There is no Google page in it at all. This time the ad slot isn’t hidden. It belongs to somebody else. OpenAI can sell ads next to a ChatGPT answer all day long, because OpenAI owns ChatGPT. Google can’t sell an ad on a screen Google doesn’t own, and that is the whole problem.

That is my position, and it’s mine, not a leaked memo: Google will never support this standard. Not because the standard is bad. Because there is nothing in it for Google to sell. The AI-summary stonewall folded the day it could be monetized. This one can’t be.

THE WORKING EXAMPLE

Nobody knows how fast AI search settles, and I won’t pretend to.

So I built a habit instead of a bet. Every Monday morning, my own system checks the standard’s changelog, the AI companies’ announcements, and the real usage data, then logs what changed, with sources. For the businesses whose llms.txt pages we maintain, anything that clears the bar folds into their next refresh in plain language. That’s what future proofing actually looks like. Not a promise. A Monday morning habit.

THE BOTTOM LINE

You don’t have to guess the date AI search settles. You just have to see the asymmetry. Publishing the page costs almost nothing. If adoption comes, you’re already readable. And the last company to tell you this matters will be the one that sells the search ads.

The 97% number doesn’t say the page is worthless.

It says you’re early.

Want to see how we handle this for businesses, watch included? kerzie.ai/back-cover

Wade Kerzie

Founder, Kerzie AI