llms.txt is a proposed plain-text file at the root of a website that gives AI systems a curated, Markdown-formatted map of the site’s most important content. In 2026 it does nothing for Google: Google’s own AI optimization guidance says it isn’t needed for AI Overviews or AI Mode. It may help AI agents navigate a … Read more
Google does not penalise content for being written with AI. It penalises content that is low-value or produced at scale mainly to manipulate rankings, however it was made. AI-assisted pages rank well when they carry real expertise, original information and careful editing; mass-produced AI pages are exactly what Google’s scaled content abuse policy targets. What … Read more
Search Console’s generative AI performance report shows how often your pages appear inside AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover’s AI features, but only as impressions: no clicks, no queries and no position. Read it as a measure of how citable your content is, and pair it with the classic Performance report to see which pages … Read more
Google AI Mode cites pages that already rank because it builds answers from Google’s own search results: in a 2026 benchmark, 93% of its citations came from the organic top 10. The way into AI answers on Google is not a separate trick. It is ranking in the top 10 for the many sub-questions an … Read more
For almost every site, the answer is no: don’t opt out of AI Overviews. Google’s 2026 opt-out setting removes your content from AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover’s AI features without hurting classic rankings, but it also removes you from the fastest-growing place people discover brands, and gives you nothing back. A narrow group of … Read more
For Google’s own AI features, GEO really is just SEO, and the data backs Google up. For ChatGPT, the assistant that sends most AI referral traffic, it isn’t: classic rankings explain only a minority of its citations. The useful position sits between the two camps: one SEO foundation, plus a small set of extra work … Read more
Since 24 September 2026, Search Console splits web performance into “text-based” and “multimodal”, so you can finally see clicks and impressions from searches that start with an image, such as Google Lens and Circle to Search. Together with the AI performance report from June and platform properties for social and video content from July, it … Read more
AI Overviews are now cutting organic click-through on the average top-ranking result by roughly a third. The instinctive response from a lot of teams is to publish more — more posts, more pages, more coverage. That instinct is understandable and, on its own, wrong. Volume doesn’t fix a visibility problem that’s structural, not quantitative. More … Read more