There is no AI file that gets you cited

In May 2026 Google Search Central published a guide to optimising for generative AI features. The sentence that matters is the dull one. AI Overviews and AI Mode are grounded in the same ranking and quality systems as Search. To be eligible as a supporting link, a page has to be indexed and eligible to be shown with a snippet. There is no separate AI index, no required llms.txt, and no special schema that buys a citation.

The same guide tells you what not to do. Do not publish a second markdown copy of every page for robots. Do not chunk content into fake sections so a model can lift them. Do not buy mentions. Spam policies now name attempts to manipulate generative AI responses in Search, not only the ten blue links. Scaled pages that exist to catch queries, whether a person or a model wrote them, sit under scaled content abuse. Google’s February 2023 post still holds: the method of production is not the test. Whether the page was made to help someone is.

What they do ask for is the thing agency blogs skip, because it is slower. Original information. A named limit. A date you can defend. The helpful-content page, updated 10 December 2025, asks who created the page, how, and why. A note that says ‘studies show larger type converts’ and links a roundup is commodity. A note that says web.dev’s threshold is 2.5 seconds, links web.dev, and tells you the check fails if you only have a lab score, is the other kind.

We draft with research assistance and we say so on the page. The check is whether you can open every source and find the sentence we used. If a claim would not survive that, it does not go in. That is also why these notes do not promise a citation. Google has not published a switch for one.

If you want a site that can be cited, the work is ordinary: one URL per topic, the words in the HTML, internal links from pages that already exist, and a date that moves only when the page actually changes. A lying lastmod is ignored. So is a page that repeats the guide above it.