Stop Writing for Robots (Again)

Danny Sullivan just shut down the “LLM-optimized content” myth

Author

John Sukowaty
January 10, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

TL;DR: Google does not want you breaking content into artificial, bite-sized chunks to appeal to LLMs. Danny Sullivan said directly: don’t do it. Write for people. Any short-term lift from gaming an LLM is fragile, temporary, and likely to disappear as ranking systems improve.

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Table of Contents

What Does This Mean For SEO?

Google is actively discouraging LLM-first formatting

On the Search Off the Record, Danny Sullivan said he spoke directly with Google engineers about this trend.

The guidance was blunt:
Google does not want publishers creating content specifically tailored for LLM consumption.

No second version.
No “LLM layout.”
No chunking purely for extraction.

That stance has not changed.

©giphy

Bite-sized content ≠ better AI visibility

There’s a growing belief that LLMs prefer short, atomic answers, so publishers should restructure everything into fragments.

Danny called that out directly.
Even if it appears to work in some systems today, that does not make it a durable strategy.

This is classic SEO behavior: optimizing for what seems to work instead of what survives.

“It works today” is not a strategy

Danny anticipated the pushback:
People will say, “I don’t believe Google, it works for me.”

His response was simple: systems change.

If your entire approach is tuned to exploit how one model ranks or extracts information today, you’re betting against the direction of improvement. Historically, that bet loses.

This is the same advice, just renamed

Replace:

  • “LLM optimization”
    with

  • “Keyword stuffing”

  • “Exact-match anchor text”

  • “Thin city pages”

Same pattern. Same outcome.

Google’s long-term direction has always been to reduce the reward for content written for the system instead of for the user.

AEO, GEO, AI visibility, these are new labels on an old problem.

Google Says Don't Turn Your Content Into Bite-Sized Chunks

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.

www.seroundtable.com/google-content-bite-sized-chunks-40728.html

What Can I Do About It?

Write once, for humans

If content makes sense to a person reading it top-to-bottom, it already aligns with where ranking systems are headed.

Clarity, flow, context, and completeness still matter more than format tricks.

©giphy

Stop creating dual content strategies

The moment a team starts maintaining:

  • “Human content”

  • “LLM content”

you’ve already lost efficiency and focus. Danny explicitly said Google does not want that future.

There is always a chance that your business website will not show up in AI search, but that goes not mean you cannot fix that.

Optimize structure, not fragmentation

Good structure helps everyone:

  • Clear headings

  • Logical sections

  • Natural summaries

That’s different from slicing content into unnatural blocks just to please an extraction model.

Structure helps comprehension.
Fragmentation helps nobody long-term.

The Takeaway

This wasn’t a vague hint. It was direct guidance. Google is repeating the same rule it always has:

Content written to game ranking systems ages poorly.
Content written for people compounds.

If you’re spending time chasing how one LLM behaves today, ask the same question Danny did: Was that the best use of your time, energy, and team focus?

History says no.