John Mueller of Google answered a question related to something a Redditor was using called llms-author.txt.
The person who posted the question is having trouble finding their name because it is the same as two other very popular organizations, making it difficult for people to find them and their services.
The question asked:
“For years this meant that my “who is this person” signal was diluted or incorrect whenever a model or search feature tried to summarize me.
FIRST STEP
First, a clear llms-author.txt file separate from the main llms.txt, which states the job title, agency, location and place of work in clear sentences rather than relying on schema alone to carry that weight.
STEP TWO
Second, adding a new Content Signal header (ai-train=no, search=yes, ai-input=yes) to robots.txt, mainly out of curiosity as to whether declaring intent at the header level changes anything measurable.”
What they wanted to know was if anyone had done controlled trials on Content-Signal articles to see if they worked.
LLMs-author.txt
Apparently LLMs-author.txt may not be the real thing, as there is no official recommendation for it, let alone its actual rank.
Content Title-Signal
This is a bit more confusing. Cloudflare had proposed a content directive for robots.txt. Cloudflare later used the same Content-Signal syntax as an automatically generated HTTP response header in Markdown for Agents. Markdown for Agents is a Cloudflare feature that automatically serves up 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 seem to be part of the actual proposal.
Google’s Take On LLMs-Author.txt
Google’s John Mueller rightly called Cloudflare’s Content-Signal a robot order, which is what the proposal officially is.
He replied:
“I think a few things…
* Google does not use llms.txt or llms-author.txt. I don’t know of any other search engine / llm that makes sure to use these (except for SEO tools).
* AFAIK none of the clear / llms uses the “content signal” robots.txt directives. Made by a CDN, afaik it has no results in any browser or llm. Using it just adds bloat and future maintenance to your robots.txt file.
You can also add some random stuff to your robots.txt file, the crawlers just use the directives they support and ignore the others.”
A Redditor’s Solution May Not Be Technical SEO
A Redditor is pursuing a technical SEO solution to solve a problem outside of technical SEO. LLMs, chatbots, and search engines rely on signals from the web, including structured data. But in this case, because the web says that these other organizations exist with the same name, the Redditor’s problem is on the web and not an SEO problem that needs to be solved. They can find a satisfactory solution to their problem by becoming better known on the web, perhaps through interviews on videos, podcasts, and web pages. Perhaps they should do more remarkable things to increase their digital history online.
Featured image by Shutterstock/Ken Wolter
