I ARGUED WITH GOOGLE'S AI ABOUT A PAGE I WAS LOOKING AT

I ARGUED WITH GOOGLE’S AI ABOUT A PAGE I WAS LOOKING AT

Saturday morning I got into an argument with Google’s AI Mode. The subject was whether a web page exists. The page was open in my next tab while the AI told me it wasn’t real.

Here’s the setup. I sell a service built around something called llms.txt. In plain words: it’s a page that sits at the root of a website, written for AI assistants to read. Your website’s front cover is for human eyeballs. This is the back cover, the one ChatGPT and Gemini read when someone asks them “which dealer should I buy from” or “who’s a good roofer near me?”

Carvana, the largest online used-car retailer in the country, publishes one. I’ve seen it. I use it as an example with clients.

So I asked Google’s AI Mode to show it to me. It told me, confidently, that Carvana does not maintain an llms.txt page.

I pushed back. It apologized, agreed with me completely, and then described the page - except the description was invented. Developer portals, “contextual roadmaps,” details that are not on the page at all. It went from denying the page existed to making up what was on it.

I asked to see the page one more time. It went back to telling me the page doesn’t exist.

Then I did what settles every argument like this. I had my own AI fetch the page directly. It’s there: carvana.com/llms.txt, live, 6,150 bytes of plain text. It answered the same way when we fetched it identifying as OpenAI’s crawler. And Carvana’s own index page says their guide pages regenerate daily - over 6,700 of them.

AI assistants answer from memory, not from looking. That’s the whole lesson. Google’s AI wasn’t lying to me. It was answering from what it had read at some point in the past, and it had never read that page. No amount of arguing changed its mind, because I wasn’t arguing with a researcher. I was arguing with a memory.

Now flip that around and point it at your business.

When someone asks an AI assistant about your trade in your town, the answer comes from whatever those systems have read about you. If they’ve read nothing, you’re not in the answer. Not because the AI is against you. Because you’re not in its memory, and memory is all it has.

Two honest things follow from that, and I’ll give you both.

First: publishing the page is not a guarantee. Google’s AI was wrong about the biggest online car dealer in America. Nobody can promise you’ll be the answer, and you should walk away from anyone who does.

Second: the memory these tools answer from is being written right now. The businesses that are readable today are the ones that end up in it. Carvana clearly believes that. They didn’t build 6,700 daily-refreshed pages for people. People don’t read like that. Machines do.

Here’s the test, and it costs you nothing. Open ChatGPT. Ask it about your trade in your town. Then ask it about your business by name. Sit with whatever comes back.

If you don’t like the answer, that’s what I fix: kerzie.ai/back-cover

Wade Kerzie

Founder, Kerzie AI Solutions