A quiet day with one loud theme. In a new podcast and a forum reply, Google spent the day telling search teams to stop over-engineering for machines: no stripped Markdown for AI, no clever folder paths for rankings. The same content you write for people is the content that gets read and ranked.
Build for Readers, Not Crawlers
Two pieces of guidance, one message: the shortcuts people are building for AI and structure do not move rankings, and some of them quietly hurt.
- Serving Markdown for AI Strips the Signals That Help You Rank On a new Search Off the Record episode, John Mueller and Martin Splitt pushed back on the GEO trend of serving stripped Markdown pages to AI. HTML is the standard, large language models already parse it fine, and a machine-only rendition removes the structure and semantics Google uses to rank. Mueller warned against building pages no user sees. If you run a Markdown-for-LLMs setup, audit what signals it drops and put the effort into canonical HTML instead.
- A US-Specific /en-us/ Folder Gives No Ranking Edge Mueller said there is no practical SEO difference between /blog/ and /en-us/blog/ for US content. The localized path can make analytics segmentation cleaner, but folder names are not locale-targeting signals, so a restructure carries real migration risk for no ranking payoff. Restructure for reporting clarity if you need it, and fix hreflang for targeting, not the folder.