Google’s Danny Sullivan, the former Search Liaison, advised publishers not to break their content into bite-sized pieces just because they believe Google’s AI overviews or other LLMs prefer that style. He explicitly said, “we don’t want you to do that,” adding that he confirmed this with Google engineers, who also said not to tailor content in that way for LLMs. More context: On the Search Off the Record podcast released yesterday, Danny Sullivan said, “One of the things I keep seeing over and over in some of the advice and guidance, as people are trying to figure out what do we do with the LLMs or whatever, is that you should turn your content into bite-sized chunks, because LLMs like things that are really bite size, right?” He then made it clear you should not follow that advice. He continued: “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.”
What if it seems to help? He touched on that as well, saying, “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.”…