Track how AI search changes, and whether it mentions your brand.

Vendor moves

OpenAI is the most relevant vendor this fortnight. Its crawler documentation now lists four bots: GPTBot for training data, OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT search indexing, ChatGPT-User for user-initiated browsing, and the new OAI-AdsBot. OAI-AdsBot only visits pages submitted as ChatGPT ad landing pages, and OpenAI states the data it collects is not used to train foundation models. There is no published IP-range file yet, which suggests the ads program is still early. The takeaway: ChatGPT is moving toward a paid surface on top of the organic citation surface, and pages submitted as ads will be crawled and policy-checked.

Cloudflare ran an Agents Week and shipped two things that matter here. The first is the Agent Readiness score, exposed through the free checker at isitagentready.com and inside the URL Scanner in the Cloudflare dashboard. It grades a site across four dimensions and returns remediation steps you can hand to a developer. The headline from its 200,000-domain audit is that only about 4% of sites have declared any AI preferences at all. The second is Redirects for AI Training, which turns a non-self-referencing canonical tag into a hard 301 for verified AI crawlers while leaving humans and traditional search untouched. Both are edge-level controls that change how AI systems see a site without touching the origin.

Google did not ship a new guide. The change is an edit to the existing AI optimization guide: the June update added a note under "Clarifying guidance on llms.txt files" stating the files are not needed for Google Search and have no ranking or visibility effect either way. You are free to keep an llms.txt for other services that consume it, but it is not a Google Search input. Search Engine Journal summarized the broader guide as Google calling AEO and GEO "still SEO."

How LLMs read the web

The schema and llms.txt picture did not shift in substance, but it got more official. Google's written stance is now that llms.txt, content chunking, AI-specific rewriting, and special schema are not required for its generative AI features, and that ordinary SEO fundamentals of original content, crawlability, and clear structure are what feed AI surfaces. That does not make schema worthless for other engines. It means Google is telling people to stop treating AI-only files as a Google ranking lever.

The crawler-rendering story is the more actionable one. The major US assistants read raw HTML and do not run JavaScript: documented for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot, with the Vercel and MERJ study of more than 500 million GPTBot fetches finding zero evidence of JavaScript execution. The one exception among the majors is Gemini, whose Google-Extended crawler renders JavaScript because it sits on Googlebot infrastructure. Aleyda Solis added in a widely shared post that some non-US assistants, including Chinese models and Mistral, render JavaScript while the US ones do not. The US-versus-Gemini split is well sourced; the non-US detail comes from her post and I could not fully confirm it this fortnight, so treat that part as her finding rather than settled fact.

The practical rule is unchanged and now better evidenced: if important content only appears after client-side rendering, most AI assistants cannot see it. Server-side rendering or static HTML for the content you want cited is the safe path.

Community signal

From the people worth following: Aleyda Solis drove two of the fortnight's threads, the llms.txt clarification and the raw-HTML-versus-rendering split above. Lily Ray continued her run on the link between classic Google standing and AI visibility, arguing that a Google manual action measurably cuts citations in AI Overviews and ChatGPT, and that brand-built comparison and "alternative" pages are getting riskier as engines lean toward third-party sources.

On the open web, the field kept circling two poles. Semrush amplified Google's "AI search is still SEO" framing. A smaller account argued that AEO and GEO are unproven speculation with no real citation framework, a useful reminder of the skeptic position to be ready for. Practitioner how-to content kept performing: a reverse-engineered look at what gets B2B sites cited across the major assistants, and a shared AEO pipeline built on Search Console keywords, competitor analysis, Q&A blocks, and citation tracking.

What it means for your brand

The JavaScript rendering gap is the point to act on. It is concrete and easy to check. Your site can rank fine in Google and still be invisible to ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity if the content lives behind client-side rendering. Run a rendering check on the pages you want cited, and serve that content as server-side rendered or static HTML.

Google putting the llms.txt clarification into its own docs settles a recurring question. If anyone told you to build an llms.txt file to improve how you appear in Google, you can stop. It does nothing for Google Search, though it may still help other tools that read it. Put that effort into your content and structure instead.

OAI-AdsBot is an early signal to note, not a task. It tells you ChatGPT ads are coming and that ad landing pages will be crawled and policy-checked. There is nothing to optimize today, but if your buyers are shifting discovery into ChatGPT, this is the moment to start watching.

Cloudflare's Agent Readiness score is a fast, free way to get an outside read on your site. Running your domain through isitagentready.com gives you a score and a remediation list. If you are on Cloudflare and carry duplicate or syndicated content, the Redirects for AI Training toggle lets you control which URL AI engines cite.