Google's Danny Sullivan said on the Search Off the Record podcast that was published yesterday that Google does not want you to turn your content into bite-sized chunks to rank well in LLMs. He said, "we don't want you to do that" and he even spoke to Google engineers about this.
Danny implied that this does not work today with Google Search, and even if it did or if it works for another LLM system, ultimately it won't work in the long run.
Instead of doing things to rank well for specific LLMs, write the content for your users. This way when the ranking systems catch up, your content will already be what LLMs want - which is what your users want, he said.
This came up at the 17.5 minute mark in the podcast, where he said:
One of the things I keep seeing over and over in some of the advice and guidance and people are trying to figure out what do we do with the LLMs or whatever, is that turn your content into bite-sized chunks, because LLMs like things that are really bite size, right?So we don't want you to do that. I was talking to some engineers about that. We don't want you to do that. We really don't. We don't want people to have to be crafting anything for Search specifically. That's never been where we've been at and we still continue to be that way. We really don't want you to think you need to be doing that or produce two versions of your content, one for the LLM and one for the net.
And then Danny added, he can hear people listening to what he said and say, well, it works, so I don't believe Google and I am going to do it anyway. In which Danny responded:
Let's assume that, in some edge cases, let's even assume maybe in more than some edge cases, you're finding you're getting some advantage here. Maybe tiny degree measure. "No, this is my secret weapon. It's doing it." Great. That's what's happening now. But tomorrow the systems may change.So you've gone through all this effort. You've made all these things that you did specifically for a ranking system, not for a human, being because you were trying to be more successful in the ranking system, not staying focused on the human being. And then the systems improve, probably the way the systems always try to improve, to reward content written for humans. All that stuff that you did to please this LLM system that may or may not have worked, may not carry through for the long term.
So was that the best use of your time and your energy? Was that the best use of putting turmoil into your marketing department, your content department, and all your other stuff so that you could say, "A-ha, I've got the new thing that you wanted, I've brought it down from the mountain and here it is. Do these sorts of things."
This has been similar advice in SEO, and he is repeating it for AEO, GEO or whatever you want to call it.
Here is the podcast embed:
Forum discussion at X.
