SEO myths: the control test that exposes them in 15 minutes

In the summer of 2026, a British SEO consultant published a file on his site called cats.txt — an invented "standard" in which you officially declare the cats associated with your website: names, breeds, purr level. He wrote it a formal specification, announced it on LinkedIn as "the missing standard for SEO", and waited.

What happened next should change how you buy any optimization service: the absurd file passed every test used in viral posts to prove that new tactics "work". AI bots fetched it (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot). Google indexed it. And ChatGPT ended up citing the fictional cat from the file — because the page ranked in classic search. The experiment is public↗, data included.

The moral isn't about cats. It's that the same "evidence" was simultaneously selling real services for real money — llms.txt optimization, specifically. This article gives you the method: how to verify an SEO claim before you pay for it.

How a myth becomes "official truth":The mechanism

The phenomenon has a predictable pattern — we call it convergence:

1. The real observation. Someone sees something true in their logs: "AI bots fetched my llms.txt!". The fact is real; the interpretation isn't — bots fetch any public file.
2. The viral post. The observation becomes "proof": a screenshot, a tone of revelation, "the standard Google doesn't want you to know".
3. The chorus. Other authors repeat the conclusion without repeating the verification. Each new post cites the old posts, not the source.
4. Convergence. AI models, trained partly on public discourse, start repeating the chorus — and "even ChatGPT confirms it" becomes the closing sales argument. The circle closes: the myth cites itself.

At every stage, one thing was missing: the control test — the question "would something obviously absurd also pass this test?". Cats.txt demonstrated the answer: yes, it would.

The control test:15 minutes before any invoice

Four questions, in the order that cuts fastest:

What does the official source say — not "an article about" the source?

For any claim about Google: read Google's documentation and official statements, not interpretations. On llms.txt, John Mueller said explicitly that no AI system uses it — the statement was public WHILE "llms.txt optimization" services were being sold.

Would the evidence also pass on something absurd?

This is the cats.txt test. "Bots fetched it" — bots fetch everything. "It's indexed" — Google indexes cat files too. "It shows up in ChatGPT" — anything that ranks classically does. Evidence that validates the absurd validates nothing.

Who wins if you believe it?

Does the viral post sell something? The course, the service, the "compliance audit for the new standard"? Interest doesn't automatically falsify the claim — but it tells you where to press harder with questions 1 and 2.

Can it be measured on YOUR site, within a month?

Every real lever leaves measurable traces: impressions, positions, clicks, in Search Console, with a start date. "Be patient, it's long-term strategy" is sometimes true — but never a reason for there to be NO intermediate metric. Ask for the metric and the date you'll read it together; a refusal is your answer.

A real-time case study:How llms.txt was sold

The timeline, with what was verifiable at each step: the file appeared as a proposal in 2024; by 2025, "llms.txt optimization packages" were on sale; Google's official statements that the file is ignored were public; large-scale studies showed adoption without effect; and in 2026, the cats.txt control test closed the discussion. At every step, the four questions above would have stopped the invoice.

Two more quick applications of the same test: "guaranteed SEO results in 7 days" fails question 4, and "the AI detector says your text is generated" fails question 2.

What we do differently — and what you can copy for free

We're not immune to myths; we're procedurally disciplined: nothing enters our articles or reports without an official source or our own dated measurement, and when a hypothesis of ours fails the evidence — it gets retracted publicly, not repainted. The method is fully copyable and free: the four questions above, applied in 15 minutes, before any signature.