Every Website Will Soon Have Two Versions. Nobody Knows Who Pays for the Second One.

You remember when SEO first became a thing? "Why would I optimize my website for Google? People can just... visit it." Ten years later, you had an entire team doing keyword research, meta tags, backlink strategies, and schema markup. Not because you wanted to — because if Google couldn't read your site, you didn't exist. Now there's a new version of that conversation happening. "Should I make my site LLM-friendly? Should I add an llms.txt file? Should I serve structured markdown alongside my HTML?" And just like SEO, the answer is probably going to be yes. Eventually. For everyone. But here's the thing that kept me up last week. Search engines at least gave traffic back. You ranked on page one, people clicked, they saw your ads, you got paid. The exchange wasn't perfect — but there was a real feedback loop . You optimized your site, search sent visitors, visitors generated revenue. LLMs don't even pretend. They pull from 30 sites, synthesize one answer, and cite maybe 3. You're probabl