Google Confirms AI Overviews Reward Regular SEO—LLMS.txt Can Wait

Recently, at Google’s Search Central Deep Dive in Asia Pacific, Gary Illyes dropped what might be the most reassuring line for us marketers in a hot minute: if you want to rank in AI Overviews, just do normal SEO. That’s it—no secret sauce, no new protocol, nothing labeled “GEO” or “LLMO.” Just plain-Jane, tried-and-true optimization. Somehow, that’s both obvious and oddly comforting, right?

AI Overviews Aren’t a Different Beast

Kenichi Suzuki was at the event, and 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.”

I almost spilled my coffee reading that—because we’ve been chasing every shiny new acronym for months.

Think about it. Google’s AI platforms still need content that’s crawled by Googlebot and indexed in Search. So the same signals—site structure, clarity of intent, semantic relevance, backlinks—those all feed into AI Overview the way they feed regular results. If you’ve been sweating the latest bells and whistles, maybe take a breath. Keep your metadata crisp, your headings logical, and your internal linking on point. You’re already halfway there.

Key takeaways for AI Overviews

• Crawlability is king.
• Indexing rules haven’t changed.
• Core SEO signals = AI ranking signals.

Short and sweet.

LLMS.txt? Google Isn’t Buying It

Then came the surprise twist: LLMS.txt files—that text file SEOs have been tinkering with to signal Large Language Models—won’t be on Google’s roadmap. Kenichi noted during the Q&A: “Gary Illyes clearly stated that Google doesn’t support LLMs.txt and isn’t planning to.”

That doesn’t mean no one else cares. Ray Martinez shared logs showing OpenAI pinging his LLMs.txt every 15 minutes for freshness checks. On X, he quipped about those regular server hits. And hey, if you’re courting OpenAI’s favor, maybe keep your LLMS.txt tidy. But for Google? Nada.

It feels a bit like prepping a guest room for someone who decides to stay elsewhere. You thought you’d be hosting; turns out you’re just over-invested in linens.

For those of you who are not familiar with LLMS.txt—it is the new robots.txt for AI. But what does that mean in practice?

Broadly, LLMS.txt is a simple text file sitting at your site’s root (for example, https://yoursite.com/llms.txt). The idea is to give AI crawlers a roadmap:

• Which pages they can ingest
• How often to check for updates
• What sections are off-limits

Imagine it like traffic signals for bots—green light here, red light there, occasional yield signs thrown in. Enthusiasts drafted pseudo-standards:

User-agent: OpenAI

Disallow: /private/

Max-age: 86400

User-agent: *

Allow: /blog/

Refresh: daily

Why It Matters

SEO folks often ask: is all this AI hoopla killing old-school tactics? No, it isn’t. AI search might be booming, but SEO is far from dead. Organic ranking still underpins visibility, whether you’re chasing a blue link or a shiny AI snippet.

Will those AI Overview placements send the same traffic as page-one spots? That’s the million-dollar question. But if you’re skipping basic optimization, you’ve already lost before you even start.

Finally, let’s keep an eye on the broader AI ecosystem—because while Google’s sipping from its own SEO cup, others aren’t so choosy. So yes, normal SEO still reigns. But for the rest? Well, we might need a multi-pronged play.

What’s your take? Are you auditing your core SEO or chasing every new AI edge?

Drop a comment below, and let’s hash it out. Follow us on Facebook, X (Twitter), or LinkedIn for more unfiltered SEO chat.

Sources:

• www.searchengineland.com/google-says-normal-seo-works-for-ranking-in-ai-overviews-and-llms-txt-wont-be-used-459422