Every Kuwait business owner is now hearing the same pitch: add an llms.txt file, and ChatGPT will start recommending you. It's the single most common piece of AI-search advice going around right now, and Google's own documentation says directly that you don't need one. Here's what actually determines whether your business gets cited by AI search — and the technical check most sites fail without knowing it.
What "getting cited by AI" actually means
Generative engine optimisation (GEO) is the practice of getting your business mentioned or linked as a source inside AI-generated answers — Google's AI Overviews, a ChatGPT response, a Perplexity summary. It's a newer target than a normal search ranking, but it isn't a separate discipline running on different rules. It sits on top of the same technical and content foundation as regular SEO.
The llms.txt myth, and what Google actually said
llms.txt is a proposed text file, placed at the root of a site, meant to give AI systems a clean summary of a site's content. It's become a popular thing to sell as an "AI SEO" upgrade. Google's own AI features documentation is direct about what's actually required: "You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features. There's also no special schema.org structured data that you need to add."
That's not a minor caveat — it's Google stating plainly that the most commonly recommended "AI SEO" fix has no effect on the product most people mean when they say "AI search." Adding an llms.txt file isn't harmful, but treat it as housekeeping, not a strategy.
What actually gets a page into AI Overviews
Google's guidance is specific: a page generally needs to already be indexed and eligible to appear in a normal Google Search result — with a snippet — before it can be surfaced as a source inside an AI Overview. There's no separate submission path and no special AI-only optimisation. The same fundamentals that earn a normal ranking are what earn an AI citation: technical crawlability, genuine expertise and experience in the content, and pages that answer the actual question well.
The practical implication is blunt: a page that doesn't rank in the normal results has little chance of being cited by an AI Overview built from those same results.
The technical gate most Kuwait sites fail without knowing it
Before any content strategy matters, an AI system has to be able to crawl the page at all. This is where a lot of small business sites quietly fail — not because the content is weak, but because a security plugin or a hosting default blocked the crawler months ago and nobody noticed.
AI platforms don't all use one bot. OpenAI's own documentation lists three separate crawlers with different jobs: GPTBot (used for model training data), OAI-SearchBot (used for ChatGPT's search and citation results), and ChatGPT-User (fetches a page live when a user asks about it directly). Blocking GPTBot to opt out of training does not block OAI-SearchBot — they're independent settings, and conflating them is a common mistake.
| Crawler | Belongs to | What blocking it does |
|---|---|---|
GPTBot | OpenAI | Opts out of model training data — does not affect ChatGPT citations |
OAI-SearchBot | OpenAI | Removes you from ChatGPT's search and citation results |
Google-Extended | Controls use in Gemini and AI features training, separate from normal Googlebot indexing | |
PerplexityBot | Perplexity | Removes you from Perplexity's citations |
Check this yourself in under a minute: open yoursite.com/robots.txt in a browser and look for a Disallow line under any of these user-agents. This site's own robots.txt allows all of them — worth confirming on any Kuwait business site before assuming a content problem when the real issue is a blocked crawler.
What actually earns the citation, once crawlable
With the technical gate confirmed open, the content itself has to be worth lifting into an answer. A few things consistently help:
- Answer-shaped content. A clear, self-contained paragraph that directly answers a specific question is easier for an AI system to extract cleanly than the same fact buried inside a long narrative paragraph.
- Real expertise and specifics. Named clients, real numbers, first-hand experience — the same E-E-A-T signals Google already rewards in normal Search — read as more citable than generic, unattributed claims.
- Schema markup. Structured data doesn't guarantee a citation, but it makes the page's facts unambiguous to a machine reading it, which is exactly the audience an AI Overview or ChatGPT response is trying to serve.
A practical checklist
- Open your site's robots.txt and confirm GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, Google-Extended and PerplexityBot aren't disallowed.
- Confirm the pages you want cited already rank normally for their target search — AI Overviews draw from that same pool.
- Rewrite your most important paragraphs so each one answers one question cleanly, in a few sentences.
- Add or check schema markup on key pages.
- Skip the llms.txt panic — it's harmless to add, but it isn't the fix.
The advice being sold as "AI SEO" right now is mostly a file Google's own documentation says you don't need. The actual work is the same work: be crawlable, rank normally, and write like the answer, not around it.
If you want to check whether your own site is actually reachable by AI crawlers and ranking well enough to be cited, see my SEO services, or get in touch and I'll check it directly.
Related reading
- What a perfect PageSpeed score actually means for SEO
- How to rank on Google Maps in Kuwait
- ChatGPT vs Gemini vs Claude: a real comparison
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Written by Adnan Basra
Senior Web Developer & E-Commerce Manager based in Kuwait, with 13+ years building websites and driving organic growth for businesses. Get in touch →
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