A new category of advice showed up this year: special files and markup you supposedly need so AI systems can read your website. The most popular is llms.txt, a file that tells AI tools what your site contains. Adoption has been fast, and vendors have been happy to sell the setup.
Then somebody measured it. Ahrefs checked 137,210 domains and found that 97% of published llms.txt files received zero requests during the study period. Of the small share that did get traffic, AI retrieval bots accounted for 1.1% of requests. Most of the hits came from SEO audit tools looking at the file, not AI systems using it.
Google has been direct about this too. Gary Illyes said the company doesn’t support llms.txt and isn’t planning to, and that to show up in AI Overviews you simply use normal SEO practices. You don’t need GEO, LLMO or anything else.
So the useful question is whether the site you already have is legible to a machine that has to summarize it in two sentences. That turns out to have very little to do with special files.
Why this is worth your attention anyway
The traffic is real, even if the tactics being sold around it aren’t. Previsible analyzed 6.77 million sessions across 166 Google Analytics properties and found ChatGPT accounts for 92.4% of trackable AI referral traffic, growing nearly thirteenfold over 19 months.
The visitors also behave better than average. Semrush’s research puts AI search visitors at roughly 4.4 times the value of traditional organic visitors, and Adobe found AI-referred retail visitors bounce 27% less and view 38% more pages. Someone who arrives after an AI recommended you has already been pre-qualified by the recommendation.
And your own site is more central to this than the hype suggests. Semrush found business and service websites account for 50% of ChatGPT citations. AI systems do lean heavily on Reddit, YouTube, and review platforms, but half the time they’re citing a company’s own pages.
What actually makes a site readable
Five things, roughly in order of how much they matter.
Say what you do in plain language, early. An AI summarizing your business reads your service pages the way a hurried human would. If your homepage says you craft bespoke growth journeys, there’s nothing concrete to extract. If it says you’re a commercial plumbing contractor serving Travis and Williamson counties, that’s a fact a machine can repeat. Vague positioning was always a conversion problem. Now it’s a retrieval problem too.
Answer real questions in real words. The queries people type into ChatGPT are longer and more conversational than the ones they type into Google. Pages that directly answer how much does X cost, or do I need a permit for Y, get pulled into responses because the question and the answer are sitting next to each other. This is what the FAQ-structure advice is actually about, and it works whether or not you wrap it in markup.
Make your pricing and specifics machine-readable. The Previsible analysis called this out specifically. Prices, service areas, hours, and capabilities buried in an image, a PDF, or a paragraph of hedging can’t be extracted. The same information in text can be. You don’t have to publish exact prices to do this well. A stated range beats contact us for pricing every time an AI is deciding whether you fit what someone asked for.
Use schema markup, but keep it proportionate. Structured data helps machines identify what a page is: a business, a service, a review, an FAQ. On WordPress it’s mostly handled by your SEO plugin, which is why this should take an afternoon rather than a project. LocalBusiness, Service, and FAQ schema cover most small business needs. Skip the vendors selling elaborate schema strategies.
Stay consistent everywhere else. Your name, address, phone number, and service description should match across your site, your Google Business Profile, and the directories that list you. AI systems cross-reference. Contradictory information doesn’t just lower confidence in one source, it lowers confidence in you.
No Fluff · No Long Contracts
Skip the Agency BS.
Get Real Results.
Let’s see if we’re a fit.
The part most sites get wrong
None of the above helps if the site is slow or the content is thin.
Crawlers and retrieval systems both have limited patience, and the same problems that hurt human visitors hurt machine ones. A page that takes six seconds on mobile, a menu that requires JavaScript to reveal your service list, a services page with 80 words on it: these are the actual blockers, and they’re unglamorous enough that they rarely make it into an AI-readiness pitch. We covered the underlying fixes in our WordPress site health guide, and none of the guidance there changed because of AI. It just got more consequential.
Reviews sit in the same category. They were a trust signal for humans first, and they’ve become an input to AI recommendations, which is a shift we get into in our online reputation guide.
A reasonable weekend audit
If you want to check your own site without hiring anyone, do this:
- Ask ChatGPT what your business does, using just your name and city. See what it says, and whether it’s right. This is the fastest diagnostic available and it costs nothing.
- Read your homepage and top service page out loud. If you can’t state what you sell and who you sell it to in one sentence pulled from that copy, an AI can’t either.
- Run your site through PageSpeed Insights on mobile. Fix what it flags before you touch anything else.
- Check that your SEO plugin has LocalBusiness or Organization schema enabled and that your business details are filled in.
- Compare your business details across your site, Google Business Profile, and two directories. Fix any mismatches.
That list is boring on purpose, and it covers most of what actually matters.
Where this sits in your priorities
AI readability is a byproduct of having a clear, fast, well-structured site, which you needed for human visitors anyway. It doesn’t compete with your other marketing for budget. That’s why it lands in the first tier of our small business marketing strategy guide: the assets you own come first, because everything else points at them.
If your site is the thing holding this back, and you’d rather have someone fix the structure, speed, and markup properly instead of adding a file that nothing reads, that’s the work our WordPress website development team does. We’ll tell you honestly if your site is already fine and the problem is somewhere else.
Feeling Overwhelmed by your Marketing?
You don’t have to figure out the tools alone. Tell us where you’re stuck.
Let's Make Marketing Work
Ready to skip the agency BS and get results? We’re taking on new clients who want straight-shooting digital marketing that actually drives growth.
And hey, if you’re in Austin, TX and want to talk strategy over a pint, we’re down for that too.