Wade Kerzie, Founder, Kerzie AI Solutions
John Bowie made a point on September 11 that the apocalypse posts keep skipping. Great Jakes measured AI referrals at 0.47 percent of sessions across its client sites, and his conclusion was that AI search is going to matter enormously and currently doesn’t matter very much.
Both true. I’d add the meter that explains how both can be true at once.
Traffic counts what the AI sends you. It can’t count what the AI says about you when nobody clicks.
When a woman in McKinney, Texas asks ChatGPT for an estate planning attorney who handles blended families, she gets three names and a paragraph on each. She calls one. That session shows up in exactly one firm’s analytics, and it shows up as “direct,” because she typed the number.
The other two firms in the answer see nothing. The forty firms that weren’t in the answer see nothing either, and they never will, because there’s no log anywhere of the answer that left them out.
Duane Forrester wrote on September 17 that “counted numbers and estimated numbers look identical in your dashboard. Only one of them can be checked.” AI referral traffic is the estimated kind. So I went looking for something that could be counted.
What I Counted
On September 15 I took a Collin County, Texas lawyer listing, 335 websites, and asked each one for the page an AI system reads first. The page is called llms.txt. It sits at the root of a website, yourfirm.com/llms.txt, and it’s plain text written for large language models, the systems behind ChatGPT and Claude.
The “s” is a plural. It’s the back cover of the book: who you are, what you do, who you’re for, in words a machine can use.
217 of the 335 have no such page. 38 refused the request with a 403, which is the site’s firewall turning away anything it doesn’t recognize as a browser. 10 domains were dead. 70 answered with something.
Then I checked the 70 a second time, because “answered” isn’t “real.” 11 of them serve the same page no matter what address you ask for. Ask for llms.txt, ask for anything.txt, you get the homepage. An AI gets your homepage too, which is the thing it was trying to avoid reading.
That leaves 58 real pages, 17 percent of the 335. Five of those belong to a locksmith, an allergy clinic, an accountant, a chiropractor and a financial planner who share the listing, so 53 law firms.
Of the 53, 17 were written by the website builder. Wix and GoDaddy generate the page automatically: a one-line description, a list of your pages, sometimes your hours. One I read says the firm is “your trusted legal partner” and stops.
A machine can’t do anything with that. Nobody asks ChatGPT for a trusted legal partner. They ask who handles a contested will in Collin County probate court and whether the first call costs anything.
So the honest count is 36 law firms, about 11 percent of the listing, with a page that isn’t builder boilerplate. A few estate and family firms in McKinney and Plano are among them. I ran the same check on 503 restaurant sites earlier this month: 83 had the page, about 16 percent.
Lawyers and restaurants are in the same place.
What A Real Page Says
I run this page daily for a Buick GMC dealership in Colorado, so I’ll tell you what a real one contains and you can judge whether yours does. Name, address, phone, in plain text. The practice areas in the words a client uses, not the words the bar uses.
Who you take and who you don’t: a family firm that won’t touch CPS cases should say so, because the AI will otherwise send that caller to you. The counties and courts you appear in. What a first consultation costs and how long it runs.
Languages. A date at the top and a line about what changes. And a note to the AI about what to confirm with a human before it promises anything. Under a page of text. No adjectives.
Two Google Answers, and Why Both Help You
Google Search Central says plainly that you don’t need machine-readable files or AI text files to appear in its AI features. Believe them. Google Search ignores the page, and anyone who tells you it lifts your rankings is wrong. Chrome, from the same company, now audits sites for that page and calls it “a machine-readable summary of a website’s content, specifically designed for LLMs and AI agents.”
One product sells search ads, the other doesn’t, and they’ve drawn the line right there. The page isn’t for rankings. It’s for the answer.
The ten-minute check
Type yourfirm.com/llms.txt. A 404 means you’re one of the 217.
Type yourfirm.com/anything.txt. If you get the same page, you’re one of the 11, and the AI is reading your homepage.
Read what’s there. If it’s your page list and your hours, the builder wrote it.
Now ask ChatGPT, with web search on, the question your best client asked before she called you. Then ask Claude. Read who it names, what it says about you, and what it gets wrong. That’s the number your analytics will never show you: not the one session it sent, but the twenty it answered without you.
If you got the 403, ask whoever runs your site whether it refuses requests that don’t look like a browser. 38 firms in my county are invisible for that reason alone, and most of them paid for the firewall.
John’s line holds. AI search is going to matter enormously, and today it doesn’t matter much, if you’re reading the traffic meter.
The apocalypse isn’t in your traffic. It’s in the answer nobody logs. The check is free and takes ten minutes. Nothing in it needs me.
Wade Kerzie, Founder, Kerzie AI Solutions, McKinney, Texas
Bio: Wade Kerzie spent thirty years leading enterprise sales teams and now runs Kerzie AI Solutions in McKinney, Texas. His last trade byline ran in Nation’s Restaurant News.
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/wade-kerzie-10b6483
