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This week's updates touch how you measure AI visibility, what to expect from llms.txt, and where the agentic web heads next. Microsoft shipped new AI citation tools, fresh data landed on llms.txt, Google and a coalition published agent specs, and the UK set new ranking rules for Google Search. Here's what matters for your work.
Bing Rolls Out AI Citation Share
Microsoft is rolling four new features into the Bing Webmaster Tools AI Performance dashboard: Citation Share, Intents, Topics, and Compare. All four are in preview right now, still rolling out globally.
Citation Share is the headline grabber. It reports the percentage of AI citations your site captures for a given grounding query — so you can see not just whether you were cited, but how you stack up against competitors. Intents and Topics group those queries to ease a data limit in the current dashboard, while Compare lets you lay a past period over the present one.
Here's why this matters: Citation Share is the first metric in Bing Webmaster Tools to show your AI visibility against competitors'. But there's a catch — it's Bing data only, covering Copilot and Bing's own answers. It says nothing about Google, where Search Console still offers no citation-style counts.
Gianluca Fiorelli, founder of ILoveSEO.net, put it bluntly on LinkedIn: "Bing Webmaster! The Google Search Console we would like to have."
The takeaway? If you're running Bing ads or driving traffic through Copilot, this is useful. If you're betting your AI visibility strategy on Google alone, it's a partial picture at best.
llms.txt Takes Two Hits This Week
llms.txt got hammered from two directions. Google's John Mueller said the file can't help an LLM tell one site from another, and new Ahrefs data showed the bots that matter barely fetch it.
Speaking on Search Off the Record, Mueller argued that llms.txt can't differentiate sites for discovery because it's self-reported by the very site hoping to be chosen. He pointed back to ordinary HTML and internal links instead — the stuff that's already there.
Then Ahrefs dropped data across 137,000 domains: 97% of llms.txt files drew zero requests. The retrieval bots that generate citations — ChatGPT, Perplexity — made up just 1% of the fetches that did happen.
Both findings point the same way. A self-reported file can't make an LLM choose you, and the bots that generate citations barely fetch it. Don't expect llms.txt to move your AI search visibility.
It still earns a narrow place with the coding agents and training crawlers that read it, which keeps it cheap to maintain. Same conclusion SE Ranking reached months ago with their look at 300,000 domains.
Nat Miletic, founder at Clio Websites, summed it up on LinkedIn: "llms.txt is low cost to publish, fine to have. Just don't expect it to move AI visibility right now."
Two New Agent Specs Land
Two agent specifications dropped within days of each other, both repeating the llms.txt playbook: publish a structured file on your domain for software to read.
Open Knowledge Format (OKF) v0.1 came from Google Cloud. It's a markdown format for packaging organizational knowledge — datasets, metrics, runbooks — in a way AI agents can read.
Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD) v0.9 came from a coalition including Google, Microsoft, GitHub, and Hugging Face. It's a draft spec for how agents find and verify tools, skills, and other agents.
Neither spec asks anything of you this week. Both are early — OKF at version 0.1, ARD at 0.9 — and the same unsettled question of adoption hangs over them.
Martin Jeffrey, founder at Harton Works, compared ARD to the early days of search: "It is the sitemap, reborn for capabilities rather than pages."
Suganthan Mohanadasan, co-founder at Snippet Digital (who built two free tools for the format), tempered expectations: "This is not a magic mushroom and won't increase your AI visibility overnight."
Watch which formats catch on before committing to any.
UK Orders Google To Rank Fairly
The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) set new rules for Google Search. The Fair Ranking requirement covers UK organic results, including AI Overviews but not ads.
Google must now:
- Rank on objective, non-discriminatory criteria
- Give advance notice of significant changes
- Offer a route to raise ranking concerns
A second requirement turns Google's voluntary UK data portability tool into a legal obligation.
Google disputed the premise, saying its ranking is already fair and transparent. But the advance-notice and complaints requirements are the parts that could touch daily work, replacing the black-box core update with warning and a way to push back.
Laura Iancu, founder of Searchpedia, put it more bluntly: "No more 'oopsie, we just dropped another core update.'"
Chloe Smith, strategic SEO lead at Blue Array, expects pushback: "I expect Google will try to find a way around this."
Like the CMA's early-June opt-out requirement, fair ranking applies only in the UK. The real impact comes down to how Google chooses to implement it.
Theme: The Structured-File Trap
Most of this week circles the same request. Publish a structured file for AI to read, and host it on your own domain.
llms.txt is the cautionary tale. The file already exists, yet Google says it can't tell sites apart and the data says the bots barely read it. OKF and ARD are that same request arriving fresh, their adoption still unproven.
Bing's new tools sit on the far side of the bargain, measuring whether any of this publishing actually turns into citations. The request is becoming routine even where the payoff isn't.
Which of these formats earns its keep is still being decided. Sorting the winners from the files nobody reads is the work this week hands you.
Top Stories This Week
- Bing Rolls Out AI Citation Share In Webmaster Tools
- Google's Mueller Says llms.txt Can't Help LLMs Differentiate Sites
- 97% Of llms.txt Files Got No Requests, Ahrefs Data Shows
- Google Cloud Announces The Open Knowledge Format
- Google, Microsoft Back Draft AI Agent Discovery Spec
- Google Must Give Notice Before Significant Ranking Changes
