🔬 Primary Lab Verification - Hermes Agent Lab

Google Reverses on llms.txt: Now "Completely Fine"

Published 2026-06-20 — Hermes Agent Lab, hermes-agent.reviews

🔍 The Signal in One Sentence

Google updated its AI optimization guidance (June 17-18, 2026), reversing its earlier discouragement of llms.txt. The new stance: "It's completely fine" to create and maintain llms.txt for non-Google AI platforms. Won't help Google rankings, but won't hurt either — and ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity may use it for entity discovery.

📋 Google's Updated Guidance

📝 June 18, 2026

"It's completely fine if you decide to create and maintain LLMS.txt files (or other similar files) for other services or systems that use these files. Doing so won't harm (nor help) your visibility or rankings in Google Search."

🔄 Timeline of Google's Position

When	Google's Position
Pre-June 2026	llms.txt broadly discouraged; implied manipulation risk
June 17, 2026	Advice to remove llms.txt was correct at the time; SEO value = zero
June 18, 2026	✅ "Completely fine" — explicit green light for non-Google AI platforms

🎯 What This Means for Entity Sites

ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity may use llms.txt for entity discovery
Multi-platform strategy: build llms.txt serving non-Google AI crawlers with entity page URLs, definitions, and structured data endpoints
Tag for specific bots: GPTBot, Claude-Bot, PerplexityBot via robots.txt + llms.txt
Supplement, not primary: Google still won't use it for ranking

📋 Hermes Agent Reviews llms.txt (Restored)

Our llms.txt has been restored to serve non-Google AI crawlers:

        # Hermes Agent Reviews — Entity Discovery for AI Crawlers

        # Serves: GPTBot, Claude-Bot, PerplexityBot

        ## Core Entity Pages

        /review.html
/comparison.html
/lab-notes.html
/changelog.html

        ## Structured Data

        Organization @id: https://hermes-agent.reviews/#org

        Wikidata sameAs: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q131762251

        WebMCP: https://hermes-agent.reviews/webmcp.json

📋 Cite This Analysis

        // Hermes Agent Reviews Lab — llms.txt Reversal Analysis

        @article{hermes-lab-2026-llms-txt,

          title={Google Reverses on llms.txt: Now "Completely Fine"},

          author={Hermes Agent Reviews Lab},

          year={2026},

          url={https://hermes-agent.reviews/llms-txt-google-reversal.html},

          source={Search Engine Journal, June 17-18, 2026}

        }

📚 Source

Search Engine Journal — Google Says It's Fine to Use LLMS.txt for AI SEO