Three SEO Myths That Many People Get Half Wrong

Three SEO Myths That Many People Get Half Wrong

A lot of AI SEO discussions are only half correct.

llms.txt is not a magic file that makes large AI crawlers automatically index your website. It is more like a guide for AI Agents when they are researching your brand.

FAQ Schema may no longer appear frequently as expandable FAQ blocks in Google search results, but it still helps AI systems understand question-and-answer content.

Product Schema is still essential for e-commerce websites. In fact, Google is asking for more structured product data, not less.

In the AI search era, the focus is shifting.

It is no longer only about making content visible to humans.

It is also about making your website readable, understandable, and quotable by AI.

1. Does AI really ignore llms.txt?

Yes and no. It depends on what kind of AI you are talking about.

Large-scale crawlers like ChatGPT and Perplexity usually read robots.txt when crawling websites, not llms.txt.

They do not automatically scan every website’s llms.txt file before deciding how to crawl, rank, or cite content.

So from that angle, the statement “AI does not read llms.txt” is partially correct.

But that is not what llms.txt was designed for.

The llms.txt specification, proposed by Answer.AI and Jeremy Howard, is mainly designed for RAG, or Retrieval-Augmented Generation.

The idea is simple:

When someone uses an AI Agent to research your brand, product, service, or documentation, the AI can use llms.txt as a structured guide to understand your website faster.

Tools such as Claude Projects, Cursor, and other AI-assisted workflows follow a similar logic.

So the positioning has to be clear.

llms.txt is not a magic SEO file for automatic AI indexing.

It is a guidebook for AI Agents when they are trying to understand your brand.

Reference: llms.txt official proposal https://llmstxt.org/

2. If Google reduced FAQ rich results, is FAQ Schema still useful?

Yes. But its role has changed.

Google did reduce the visibility of FAQ rich results in traditional search results.

The expandable FAQ blocks that used to appear under search results are now mostly limited to high-authority government and health websites. For most regular websites, they are rarely shown anymore.

Google announced this change officially in 2023.

But FAQ Schema is not useless.

It is now useful in a different way.

FAQ Schema helps AI systems understand question-and-answer content more clearly.

When a user searches for a complex question and Google generates an AI Overview, Google needs structured information to understand the page and assemble an answer.

FAQPage JSON-LD gives search engines a clear question-and-answer format.

In the past, FAQ Schema was mainly used to display content to users inside search results.

Now, its value is more about feeding structured information to AI.

Before: displayed to humans. Now: understood and used by AI.

Reference: Google Search Central FAQ changes https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2023/08/howto-faq-changes

3. Are rich results disappearing?

Not really.

Some secondary visual rich results are being simplified. FAQ rich results are a good example.

But e-commerce structured data is not going away.

Product Schema and Merchant Listing data are still very important. In fact, Google keeps adding and strengthening the required fields for product-related structured data.

For e-commerce websites, Google cares about details such as:

Product price Availability Return policy Shipping details

If any important field is missing, Search Console may show warnings or errors.

This makes sense.

Google Shopping depends heavily on structured product data.

If product rich results disappeared completely, Google Shopping would lose one of its key data sources.

So the real change is not that rich results are disappearing.

The change is that less important visual elements are being reduced, while product and merchant data are becoming more important.

Reference: Google Search Central Product structured data https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/product

The direction is the same

These three issues are pointing in the same direction.

AI search is moving from “content that humans can see” to “content that AI can read, understand, and cite.”

llms.txt helps AI Agents understand your website. FAQ Schema helps AI systems understand question-and-answer content. Product Schema continues to support e-commerce search and Google Shopping.

These tools are not disappearing.

Their stage has changed.

For SEO and AI SEO, the next question is no longer only:

“Can users see this content?”

It is also:

“Can AI understand it clearly enough to use it?”

I also write about SEO, AI SEO, structured data, and website optimization here:

https://des13.com