LLM.txt files — trend or trash?
episode
Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
6 min
2 speakers
2 chapters
transcribed 1 month ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What is the overall premise of the LLM.txt files discussion?
The Voices of Search Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast? I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth, and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit IHear Everything.com. Welcome to the Voices of Search Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts? Sit back, relax, and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom. Here's today's host of the Voices of Search Podcast, Tyson Stockton.
One more and this one's uh this will be a shorter one. So this one again we're gonna look at trend or trash. LMTXT files trend or trash.
Mmm. Well sounds fun. Trash. Total trash. did not get that answer out fast enough. So total trash, right? Let's be crystal clear. Every crawler out there follows the robot.txt protocol. That's the protocol. All crawlers follow that protocol. Robots.txt. LLM.txt is an invention, kinda like domain authority from Oz. It's their own makeup. The engines don't look at domain authority to make any decisions. They don't factor that into anything on their end. In fact, you could say that um Oh, what was the Google had this for years. Um, the name for their DA it was rank it's escaping me now, haven't talked about it for so long. Holy cow, it was one to ten. They had a rank rating for you and everybody was chasing it. We had it in a little toolbar at the bottom and it was like, you know, this was every it's like if you had a higher seven out of ten, then I wanted a link from you back to me and that would help boost my score and all of that, right?
Um oh page rank. And um those types of things are useful in that they are visualizations of a complex topic. Okay. Um for years I wanted to I wanted to create one when I was at Bing. Um the problem was the scale at Bing was, I think it was like Wanda Sixty two thousand or something. So it didn't make sense. You you had to translate that into something that was like rational for the human mind to wrap their head around. You know, because like, how do I tell you you score four hundred of sixty two thousand? What does that even look like on a graph? You could barely see the color. Like it just looks heartbreaking, you know?
Why do the hosts consider LLM.txt files to be ‘total trash’?
Um, but there was never any value in exposing it because what the page rank score taught us was that people wanted to game scores like that. They used them for tracking their gamification of like, oh, well, if I get a link from here, then that'll boost mine. And if I get a bunch of those links, that boosts mine, that boosts my ranking. And even though I don't deserve to be ranking well, I am ranking well, and I'll take the traffic and the revenue and as long as I don't pop on a radar in Mountain View, I'll be okay. Like and I think everybody's learned from those bad old days and kind of moved on. Um but the fact of the matter is um things like the LLM.txt are those are those are made up. Um conceptually I get it.
Somebody looked at it and went, oh robot TXT is for the old crawlers, we need one for the new crawlers. No, you don't, because the new crawlers are still just crawlers. and they follow robot.txt and point and fact, CC bot, the Creative Commons bot, is actually responsible for a whole bunch of the data that makes its way into these systems because all of the systems access the data from Creative Commons bot. So If it's following robot TXT, you don't need anything else. That's it. Maybe in the future, but right now, I'm gonna toss that in the trash.
Yeah, it's like you you can create whatever TXT file you want. It doesn't mean anyone's gonna look at it, but you can create them for sure.
Totally, totally. And you know what, on that point, I think this is really important as well. So for your sitemaps and your robot TXT, spend the time to get to learn how the actual syntax should look, like what you should be putting into those files, especially robot TXT. You know, I I'll skip the old warning about how easy it is to block everything on your website and like screw yourself because you know you put the slash in there in the wrong spot, right?
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