For about two years, \"AI SEO\" has been sold as a separate discipline with its own tools, its own file formats and its own consultants. Google has now published an official guide on optimizing for its AI features, and the guide quietly dismantles most of that industry.
\n\nThe document is Google's AI features and your website, on Search Central. It is worth reading in full, because two lines in it should change what a lot of local businesses are paying for.
\n\nGoogle's position is that its generative features sit on top of the same ranking systems as normal Search. In their words, the best practices for SEO continue to be relevant because the AI features are rooted in core Search ranking and quality systems. Optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for search.
\n\nThat is deflating if you have been sold an AI visibility package. It is good news if you are a contractor who has been doing the boring work — a complete profile, real reviews, pages that answer real questions. You are already doing AI SEO. Nobody needed to sell it to you separately.
\n\nThis is the part that made me go and check our own site.
\n\nllms.txt is a proposed standard: a plain-text file at the root of your domain that lists your important pages for large language models, the way robots.txt does for crawlers. It has been widely recommended over the last year. Google's guide states plainly that Google Search ignores these files, along with other AI-specific markup. Same for \"chunking\" your content into fragments for machines, and rewriting pages into AI-friendly phrasing.
\n\nWe generate an llms.txt on this site automatically at build time. So does a lot of the local SEO industry. My honest position after reading the guide:
\n\nThe recommendations in the guide are unglamorous, which is how you know they are real:
\n\nSearch Console now has a generative AI performance report. That is the measurement surface, and it matters more than any third-party AI visibility score, because it is Google reporting on Google.
\n\nIf you take one thing from the guide: the profile you have been ignoring is the AI strategy. Google said so in its own documentation. Everything else in the AI SEO market is currently downstream of that sentence.
\n\nGoogle pointing businesses toward their profiles is notable precisely because most profiles in competitive local search are not in good shape. We pulled data from 1,440 Google Business Profiles appearing in top-10 map results across 29 US cities and five trades in May and July 2026. The picture is consistent enough to be useful.
\n\nThe services section — the structured field where you list what you do, with descriptions — was absent in 1,426 of the 1,440 profiles we reviewed. That is not a rounding error. Breaking it down by trade: 288 of 290 roofing profiles had no services section populated, 287 of 290 HVAC profiles, 287 of 290 plumbing profiles, 285 of 290 electrical profiles, and 279 of 280 landscaping profiles. These are businesses already ranking in the top ten. They are visible enough. The question Google's guide raises is whether a sparse profile limits how often they appear inside AI-generated responses, where Google is pulling structured data to construct answers.
\n\nOther signals from the same sample, collected May and July 2026: 65 percent had no booking link attached, 93 percent had no Q&A entry, and every single profile — all 1,440 — had gone more than 90 days without a post. Four percent had no website linked at all. Median review count across all five trades was 229, which suggests these are not brand-new or inactive businesses. They have customers. They have reviews. They simply have not filled in the fields.
\n\nThis matters in the context of the guide because Google is explicit that the Business Profile is the input surface for local businesses to appear in AI features. If the input is incomplete, the output is uncertain. A services section with real descriptions of what you do and where you do it is the kind of structured, fetchable information an AI summary can actually use. A blank field gives it nothing to pull from.
\n\nThe guide does not prescribe a checklist, so here is one drawn from its priorities combined with what the profile data above suggests is most commonly missing.
\n\nThis post is written for local service businesses — contractors, trades, home services — that show up in map results and want to understand what Google's guide means for them specifically. If you run a national e-commerce site, a SaaS product, or a publisher, the profile advice does not transfer directly. The generative AI performance report and the non-commodity content guidance apply broadly, but the emphasis on Business Profiles is a local-search concern. Do not restructure a content operation around this post; it was not written for that context.
\n\nSimilarly, if you are already doing all of the above — complete profile, real content, clean technical setup — this guide probably confirms your approach more than it changes it. The businesses most affected by the AI SEO consulting market have been smaller operators who were sold new tools before the basics were in place.
\n\nProbably not. Removing it costs as much effort as keeping it, and other AI systems besides Google may read it. The reasonable position is to keep it, stop counting it as a ranking activity, and redirect any budget that was going toward its creation or maintenance toward the profile and content work that Google says it actually uses.
\n\nGoogle's guide does not make a direct claim about post frequency and AI visibility. What it does say is that the Business Profile is the input surface for local AI results. Posts are one signal within that profile. Every business in our May and July 2026 sample had gone more than 90 days without a post, including businesses in top-ten positions, so posting frequency alone is clearly not a ranking prerequisite. Whether it influences AI feature inclusion is not something we can confirm from the guide or our data.
\n\nGoogle's guide does not specify one, and we have no data to answer this. The median review count across our 1,440-profile sample was 229, but that reflects who is already in the top ten in competitive markets — it is not a threshold. A business with fewer reviews can appear in AI features if the other signals are strong. Reviews matter for trust and conversion regardless of AI; they are not the primary variable the guide is asking you to optimize.
\n\nYes. Google's guide treats the Business Profile and the website as separate inputs. The profile handles structured local data — services, location, reviews, Q&A. The website handles content depth and expertise signals. A strong profile with a thin or uncrawlable website leaves the content side of the equation empty. Both need to be in order.
\n\nWant to know whether your profile is complete enough for Google to use it?
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