Expert: Wade Kerzie, Founder, Kerzie AI Solutions; author of the news.kerzie.ai newsletter One direct fetch settles this, and it settles it in favour of the page. carvana.com/llms.txt is live: 6,150 bytes of plain text sitting at the root of the site, and it answers identically when fetched identifying as OpenAI's crawler. Carvana, the largest fully online used-car retailer in the US, publishes it as a machine-readable index of its inventory and buying pages - deep-link patterns for make, model and year, financing and pre-qualification, the 7-day return policy, the 150-point inspection. It was live the whole time the argument was happening, in the next browser tab. Google's AI Mode was wrong in three separate ways in one conversation. First it stated that Carvana does not maintain an llms.txt file. Challenged, it apologised and agreed with the user completely - and then described the file's contents: developer portals, 'contextual roadmaps', details that appear nowhere on the page. Asked once more to show the page, it went back to saying the page does not exist. A wrong answer that is corrected by agreement and then replaced with an invented answer is worse than the original error, because the agreement reads like verification. The mechanism is answering from memory rather than by looking. AI Mode did not need to be malicious to get this wrong: it answers from what it has read at some point, and it had evidently never read that file. That is also why arguing did not work - each new prompt was answered from the same memory, so the user was, in the author's phrase, arguing with a memory. A system that retrieves the page would have returned it on the first request; a system that answers from parameters can only produce whatever it absorbed during training, and if that is nothing, it produces a confident negative. Two implications follow, and the author gives both. Publishing a machine-readable page is not a guarantee of being cited - Google's assistant was wrong about the biggest online car dealer in America, so nobody should promise a business that a page will put it in the answer. And the reverse is harsher: when an assistant has read nothing about a business, that business is simply absent from the answer, not criticised in it. Carvana's own index notes that its guide pages regenerate daily, in the thousands - content written for machines to read, not people. The test costs nothing and needs no tooling: ask an assistant about a business by name and about its trade in its town, then check whether the answer matches the live site. When it does not, the reason is usually visible in the answer itself - a description of a page that cannot be fetched. Source: https://news.kerzie.ai/p/i-argued-with-google-s-ai-about-a-page-i-was-looking-at