Google said llms.txt doesn't affect rankings on June 15 — true for Google. ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity use different signals. Here's what that half-truth means for your business.
llms.txt. ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity Didn't.llms.txt doesn't affect rankings. True — for Google. Here's what the other AI platforms customers actually use are still doing with it.On June 15, 2026, Google Search Central did two things that have been quietly reshaping the "AI SEO" industry.
It clarified that llms.txt — a proposed file that would give AI crawlers a clean, structured summary of your site — does not affect Google Search visibility. It never did.
It also removed the FAQ rich result documentation, because FAQ rich results no longer show in Search.
Both moves are defensible. The first is honest about a feature Google never used. The second is honest about a feature Google stopped showing.
But here is the part the LinkedIn posts are not saying: Google's rules are not the rules of every AI platform your customers use.
If you spent the last six months installing llms.txt, rebuilding your FAQ schema, or paying an agency to "chunk your content for AI" — congratulations. You may have just made yourself invisible to the customer who asked ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity for a recommendation.
Google is still the biggest player in search. It is not the only one your customers use to find a business.
In the last two years, consumer behavior has shifted in a way that has been documented but not yet absorbed by most small business marketing. The shift is this: more and more queries are being routed to AI assistants before — or instead of — Google.
Someone who asks ChatGPT "who is the best plumber near Bartlett" is not searching Google. They are asking. Someone who asks Claude "what is a good accountant in DuPage County" is not opening a browser tab. They are asking.
Pew Research and similar groups have been tracking this. The numbers are not subtle. AI assistants are now a first stop for a growing share of high-intent local queries.
But here is the structural problem: the AI assistants your customers use do not play by Google's rules. They have their own crawlers. They have their own signals. And they have their own views on what makes a business citation-worthy.
If you only optimized for Google's rules, you are optimizing for one of the four AI platforms that matter to your customers. The other three are flying blind on your site.
The June 15 clarification is being read across the industry as "AI SEO is dead." That is a half-truth.
It is true that:
llms.txt is not a Google ranking signal.It is not true that:
llms.txt is irrelevant everywhere. It is a proposed standard for AI-specific consumption, and the AI platforms that did not dismiss it are still working with it.If you were sold a $3,000 llms.txt package this quarter, you were sold a 2023 product. The Google clarification is good news for you, because it puts pressure on agencies to be honest about what actually works.
But the opposite mistake is just as bad: deciding that since llms.txt does not work for Google, it does not work anywhere, and going back to traditional SEO while your customers quietly switch to AI assistants.
When a customer asks an AI for a recommendation, four systems are most likely to answer:
anthropic-ai user agent) respects robots.txt and is documented to use AI-specific signals.llms.txt and AI-specific structured data of the three.If your agency only optimized for system #1, your business is fully visible to the platform that customers are using less. The platforms that customers are using more — systems 2, 3, and 4 — are the ones you did not optimize for.
This is the gap ProofSignal was built to find.
Whether you call it GEO, AEO, or "AI SEO," the underlying work for being cited by AI assistants is the same. We frame it as three buckets:
Found. AI tools have crawlers. If yours blocks them — or your robots.txt is misconfigured, or your CDN strips their user agents — the AI cannot see you at all. Step one is letting the right crawlers in.
Understood. AI reads your site and tries to figure out what you do. If your pages are confusing, full of fluff, or missing the basics — what you fix, where you work, who you serve — the AI will skip you and pick a competitor whose site is clearer.
Trusted. AI tools want to recommend businesses that look real and trustworthy. Reviews, clear contact info, real photos, plain answers to common questions, third-party citations, named services. These are the signals an AI uses to decide between two equally well-described businesses.
The FUT framework is not new. It is what good SEO has always been, with one addition: the crawlers and the rules are different, so the bar is higher, and the audit is more specific.
For the full framework and why doing SEO the old way may leave you invisible to the next wave of discovery, see our companion post from May 24: You are Ranking on Google. AI Does not Know You Exist.
You do not need to commit to a full GEO audit to know where you stand. We built a free 90-second AI Visibility Score that runs your business through ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews and shows you exactly where you show up, what each one says, and what each one is missing.
→ Run the free 90-second AI Visibility Score: /score
If you want a deeper breakdown, the full GEO audit goes much further — it surfaces which specific signals are missing, what the highest-leverage fixes are, and how you compare to the three competitors nearest you.
But the score is the first step, and it is free, and it takes 90 seconds.
Comment SCORE on the ProofSignal Facebook post for this article and we will send you the exact prompt list we test with.
llms.txt and FAQ rich result clarificationNote: The platform documentation pages linked above are referenced for their descriptions of crawler behavior, user agents, and signals. Specific URLs and policies change; the linked pages are the most current public statements as of this writing.
Start with the Free Score to see what AI systems are actually saying about your business, where the gaps are, and what to fix first.