Google Answers Question About LLMs-Author.txt For SEO

Google’s John Mueller answered a question related to something a Redditor was using that’s called an llms-author.txt

The person who posted the question is having a hard time being found for their name because it is the same as two other more popular entities, making it more difficult for people to find them and discover their services

The question asked:

“For years this meant a chunk of my “who is this person” signal was diluted or outright wrong whenever a model or a search feature tried to summarize me

FIRST STEP

First, an explicit llms-author.txt file separate from the main llms.txt, stating job title, agency, location and area of practice in plain sentences rather than relying on schema alone to carry that weight

SECOND STEP

Second, adding the new Content-Signal header (ai-train=no, search=yes, ai-input=yes) to robots.txt, mostly out of curiosity about whether declaring intent at the header level changes anything measurable.”

What they wanted to know was if anyone has run any controlled tests on Content-Signal headers to see if they work

LLMs-author.txt

Apparently the LLMs-author.txt may not be a real thing, as in there is no official proposal for it, much less an actual standard for it

Content-Signal Header

This is somewhat more confusing. Cloudflare had proposed a Content-Signal directive for robots.txt. Cloudflare later used the same Content-Signal syntax as an HTTP response header automatically generated in Markdown for Agents. Markdown for Agents is a Cloudflare feature that automatically serves a Markdown version of a web page whenever a web client requests it

So of the two things the Redditor is using, neither of them appear to be a part of an actual proposal

Google’s Take On LLMs-Author.txt

Google’s John Mueller correctly referred to Cloudflare’s Content-Signal as a robots directive, which is what the proposal formally is

He responded:

“I guess a few things …

* Google doesn’t use llms.txt or llms-author.txt. I don’t know of any other crawler / llm confirming they’re using these (other than SEO tools)

* AFAIK none of the crawlers / llms use the “content-signal” robots.txt directives. It was made up by a CDN, afaik it has no effects whatsoever for any crawler or llm. Using it just adds bloat & future maintenance to your robots.txt file

You can also add other arbitrary things to your robots.txt file, crawlers just use the directives that they support and ignore the rest.”

The Redditor’s Solution May Not Be Technical SEO

The Redditor is pursuing a technical SEO solution to solve a problem that is way outside of technical SEO. LLMs, chatbots, and search engines rely on signals from the web, including structured data. But for this situation, because the web says these other entities exist with the same name, the Redditor’s issue is really with the web and not a technical SEO issue to solve. They may find a satisfactory resolution to their problem by becoming better known on the web, perhaps by being interviewed on videos, podcasts, and in web pages. Perhaps they should do more noteworthy things to expand their digital footprint on the Internet.

CategoryNewsSEO

Source: www.searchenginejournal.com