Most Technical SEO Already Supports AI Search, Agency Says

Victorious, a search agency founded in 2013, has issued a statement addressing the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on search engine optimization (SEO). According to the agency, the technical changes required for AI search are minimal and largely align with existing SEO practices.

The agency's CEO, Michael Transon, explained that the differences between traditional search and AI search are not as significant as the industry often portrays.

Google's September 2026 spam update, the fourth of the year, is rolling out globally this week. This update highlights the importance of maintaining a healthy website structure, which includes crawlability, indexation, site architecture, internal linking, and rendering. These elements are crucial for both traditional search and AI search, according to Transon.

However, there are two new technical items that businesses should pay attention to. First, crawler access now requires a conscious decision instead of defaulting to existing settings. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google each publish separate crawlers for model training and for live search. A site can admit one while refusing another. Transon advised marketing and legal teams to set ground rules together and verify that the bots they intend to allow can actually reach the site. He noted that a robots.txt permission is often blocked by a firewall or CDN rule that needs to be checked.

The second change involves how pages are built. AI systems retrieve passages rather than whole sites and may never follow an internal link. Therefore, every important page should say who the company is and what it does in visible text near the top, as if it were the only page the system reads. Transon recommended skipping the llms.txt file, which has circulated widely this year. He stated, "No AI system currently uses llms.txt," referring to a statement by Google's John Mueller last year. Nothing published since has contradicted him.

Transon emphasized that an llms.txt file becomes one more source of brand information that can go stale if it isn't maintained alongside product rollouts or repositioning. The agency's guidance is to disregard advice to create a special file for machines unless the site has developer documentation, which is what the format was designed to describe.

Transon's default recommendation is to not create an llms.txt file unless there is a specific reason, such as developer documentation.

Victorious is a search agency that helps brands grow their visibility in Google and AI search platforms, including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews. The agency has been named Search Agency of the Year five times and is headquartered in San Francisco.