22 Sep We Removed llms.txt From 22 Client Websites. Here Is Why.
In June, our team spent part of a week undoing work we had done earlier in the year. We went site by site through our client fleet and removed a file called llms.txt from 22 websites, then verified every one came back clean.
That is a strange thing for an agency to admit, so let us answer the obvious question first: llms.txt was pitched across the marketing industry as a file that tells AI systems how to read your website, a robots.txt for the AI era. It costs almost nothing to add, so earlier this year, like a lot of agencies watching AI search reshape our clients’ traffic, we added it as a hedge. Then Google published its official guidance on optimizing for generative AI features and said, in plain language, that it does not use llms.txt and no special AI files or markup are needed. The moment the hedge became noise, we removed it, everywhere, and confirmed the cleanup on every site.
This post is about that decision, because how your agency behaves when the ground shifts tells you more than any sales deck will.
What Google actually said
Google’s guidance, published in its Search Central documentation, is unusually blunt about the tactics vendors were selling. According to Google, you do not need llms.txt or any special AI file. You do not need to break your content into chunks for AI. You do not need to rewrite pages in an AI-friendly style or stuff in every variant of a phrase, because its systems understand synonyms and meaning. There is no special structured data that unlocks AI features. And paying for seeded brand mentions across blogs and forums is counteracted by the same spam systems that have always existed.
What does matter, per Google: content with a genuine point of view that could only come from you, organized so a human can navigate it, on a technically sound site that can rank in ordinary search. AI Overviews and AI Mode retrieve pages through Google’s normal ranking systems. In Google’s own words, optimizing for AI search is SEO. There is no second playbook.
Why we are telling you this instead of hoping you never notice
Because the alternative is worse. The GEO and AEO space right now is full of vendors selling exactly the tactics on Google’s ignore list. We have seen proposals put in front of small businesses that charge monthly fees for maintaining llms.txt files, chunking content for AI, and placing brand mentions in listicles. If your agency is selling you any of those as an AI visibility strategy in late 2026, they are selling you something the search engine has publicly said it ignores.
We got the llms.txt call wrong for a few months alongside much of the industry, at a time when there was no official guidance either way. The file was inert; it neither helped nor hurt rankings. But leaving dead files on client sites because removing them is awkward to explain is how technical debt and vendor mistrust both start. So we removed it, logged the work, and moved our AI visibility effort to the things Google says count.
Where that effort goes instead
The honest version of AI search optimization looks like the rest of our year:
- First-hand content. Posts like this one, and like the client stories we publish, exist because AI systems comparing many sources reward the one source that knows something the others cannot. A summary of what is already online adds nothing. An account of what actually happened in our shop cannot be replicated.
- Structure machines can read. Semantic markup, accessible navigation, clean heading order. This overlaps almost entirely with accessibility work, which is why we audit both together.
- Technical fundamentals. Crawlable pages, fast hosting, correct indexing, verified in Search Console. If a page cannot rank in normal search, it cannot be retrieved for an AI answer. That is the actual gate.
- Owned data sources. Your website and your Business Profile are what Google’s AI grounds local answers in. We spend our clients’ budgets there, not on rented placements.
The takeaway for any business buying marketing in 2026
Ask your provider one question: when the platform publishes guidance that contradicts what you sold me, what happens? The answer you want is the boring one. They read the guidance, they change the work, and they tell you about it, including the part where they reversed themselves.
AI search is the biggest shift in how customers find businesses since the smartphone, and it is moving fast enough that everyone serving this market will be wrong about something eventually. Pick partners by how they correct, not by how confidently they pitch.
If you want a second opinion on an AI visibility proposal sitting in your inbox, send it over. We will tell you which line items Google has already said it ignores. That review costs you nothing, and it might save you a year of paying for noise.