Indexive Research

llms.txt is a proposed Markdown file that gives AI agents a short guide to a website. Google says its Search does not use it, and says it neither helps nor harms visibility. We could not verify public statements from OpenAI or Anthropic that their systems read it.

Google says there are no extra requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode beyond being indexed and eligible to show a snippet. This guide covers how sites appear, what Google says you do not need, the snippet and indexing controls, and where the traffic shows up.

We think AI search work and SEO work are mostly the same list of tasks. The documented facts are marked and sourced. The conclusion is our opinion.

AI companies run separate bots for training, search indexing and user-requested fetches, and each vendor documents its own robots.txt behavior. This reference lists what each vendor states, including where user-initiated fetchers may ignore robots.txt.

Structured data is code that tells search engines what a page is about. Google prefers JSON-LD, requires the markup to match visible content, and has retired several rich result features, including FAQ and How-to. This guide covers the rules, the testing tools, and the dated changes.

Google may show a date next to your result, but it estimates that date from several signals. This guide covers what Google documents about byline dates, structured data dates, and sitemap lastmod, and why changing a date without changing the content is a bad idea.

A deploy that returns success has told you the request was accepted. It has not told you what visitors and crawlers receive. This field note describes our method for checking, with sources.

The Performance report is Google's first-party record of how your site appears in Search. This reference lists how Google defines each metric, the documented limits, and the main reasons its numbers differ from your analytics tool.

Core Web Vitals are three metrics for loading, responsiveness and visual stability. This reference lists the current thresholds, explains field versus lab data, and sets out what Google says about their role in ranking.

Google mainly finds pages by following links. This guide summarizes Google's documented rules for crawlable links, anchor text, linking to your important pages, and the nofollow, sponsored and ugc attributes.

Crawl budget is how much Google will crawl on your site, set by what your server can handle and how much Google wants to crawl. Google says most sites do not need to worry about it. This guide covers who does, what wastes it, and what to change.

Most SEO teams are not short of ideas. They are short of a reliable way to ship changes, check them and undo them. This note is an opinion from Indexive Research, with the documented facts marked and sourced.

A redirect sends people and crawlers from one URL to another. The status code you choose tells search engines whether the move is permanent. This guide covers the codes, how Google reads them, redirect chains, and Google's documented process for site moves.

When several URLs show the same content, Google groups them and picks one as the canonical. You can send signals about your preference, but Google makes the final call. This guide covers the signals, the mistakes that undo them, and how to check the result.

Robots.txt tells crawlers which URLs they may fetch. Noindex tells Google not to keep a page in search results. They solve different problems, and mixing them up is one of the most common ways to keep a page in Google by accident.