I’m collecting data on AI crawlers and search spiders and learning what they like to eat. It’s true that few are eating LLMS.txt, but it doesn’t tell the full story.
To have good SEO, you might not need to add structured content, but some formats, like JSON-LD, question-answer pairs, and named entities, do seem to help and attract visits. Google’s recent report on how to optimize for answer engines is likely because it is uncommon for websites to include this type of content.
But since optimization is the name of the game, don’t just listen to what Google says you should do; run your own experiments and see what the bots visit.
If you run a WordPress-powered website, grab my free open source plugin and see for yourself. It is called AEO Pugmill.
Fun fact: This blog was the first to run my AEO plugin.