Google’s Gary Illyes told attendees at the Search Central Deep Dive event in APAC that ranking in AI Overviews requires nothing beyond normal SEO. No GEO playbook, no LLMO tricks. If Googlebot can crawl and index your content, you’re eligible for AI Overviews and AI Mode, and the ranking systems behind them look a lot like the ones behind classic Search. In the same Q&A, Illyes said Google doesn’t support LLMs.txt and isn’t planning to. Barry Schwartz covered the full story at Search Engine Land.
Here’s where I come into it: Barry cited my log file analysis in that article. Google may be ignoring LLMs.txt, but my server logs show OpenAI requesting the LLMs.txt file on several of my sites roughly every 15 minutes, pinging for freshness. I posted the screenshot on X. That’s a meaningful distinction the “LLMs.txt is dead” crowd keeps missing: Google is one AI engine, not the whole answer layer.
My takeaway for higher ed and lead-gen teams: keep your technical SEO house in order, because Google’s AI surfaces feed on the same crawl and index as blue links. But don’t treat Google’s position as the final word on how every LLM discovers your content. Watch your own log files. They’ll tell you who’s actually reading what, and how often, better than any conference quote will.