Victorious: Most Technical SEO Already Supports AI Search

A common technical change brands make for AEO has no confirmed effect on AI systems. What you're already doing for traditional search is mostly enough.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA, UNITED STATES, October 6, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Most of the technical work companies are commissioning for AI search duplicates what a working SEO program already does, according to Victorious, a search agency that builds AI search visibility for brands. One tactic many marketing teams are adding, a file called llms.txt, has no confirmed effect on any AI platform.

Google's September 2026 spam update, the fourth of the year, is rolling out globally this week, and the technical health of websites is back in the trade press. In a recent episode of its podcast, The Search Signal, Victorious used the moment to separate what applies across SEO to AI search from what doesn’t, hoping to debunk quick fix tactics that won’t have a durable impact for businesses.

The agency's position is that the technical differences between ranking on Google and appearing in AI answers are far smaller than the industry presents them. Google's AI features draw on Google's own search index, so crawlability, indexation, site architecture, internal linking, and rendering all carry over without needing a new line item in your budget.

"The differences are a lot smaller than the industry makes them sound," said Michael Transon, CEO of Victorious. "They mostly involve knowing which bots you're letting in and why and making sure every page makes sense as a standalone piece of content."

There are two new technical items to 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, and a site can admit one while refusing another. If there are legal reasons your business wants to block bots from certain sections of your website, Victorious recommends that marketing and legal teams set those ground rules together, then verify that the bots they intend to allow can actually reach the site, since a robots.txt permission is often blocked by a firewall or CDN rule nobody checked.

The second change is how pages are built. AI systems retrieve passages rather than whole sites and may never follow an internal link, so 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 recommends skipping the llms.txt file, an idea that has circulated widely this year. The file is a plain-text summary of a website written for language models. "No AI system currently uses llms.txt," Google's John Mueller wrote in a Bluesky post last year, adding that he could not say whether that would change. Nothing published since has contradicted him.

In a search environment where consistent brand descriptions matter more than ever, 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.

"My default is really just don't do it," Transon said. "Don't waste your time unless you really have a very specific reason like developer documentation."

The full episode, with cited sources, is available on the Victorious website.

About Victorious
Victorious is a search agency founded in 2013 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.

Jill Maldonado
Victorious
hello@victorious.com
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