Should You Write for AI or for People?

You should write for people, not for AI, and Google now says so in its own documentation. Its AI optimization guide tells site owners they don’t need to write in a specific way for generative AI search. But the pages AI cites do share a shape, and it is the same shape a shopper in a hurry rewards.

Why Everyone Tells You to Write for AI

Everyone tells you to write for AI because the citation studies show a clear pattern in what gets quoted. Kevin Indig’s analysis of 18,012 ChatGPT citations found 44.2% came from the first 30% of the page, and cited text was twice as likely to contain a question mark.

That one study has company. Semrush compared cited and uncited pages across ChatGPT Search, AI Mode, and Perplexity, and the cited ones scored 32.83% higher on clarity and summarization and 25.45% higher on Q&A format. So agencies read numbers like those and started selling a new deliverable: content rewritten for machines.

I get why it sells. The data is real, and the naming fight over whether GEO is just SEO with a new name hands every agency a fresh label for the proposal. If the machine likes question headings and short sections, the pitch goes, then every page should be question headings and short sections.

The problem is that those studies describe pages that got cited, not pages that were written for a parser. Nobody in those datasets checked who the writer had in mind.

What Does Google Say About Writing for AI?

Google says writing for AI is not required, and it put that in its AI optimization guide in May 2026. The guide’s own line is “You don’t need to write in a specific way just for generative AI search,” and it adds that there is no requirement to break your content into tiny pieces.

Google’s Danny Sullivan was blunter a few months earlier. On a January 2026 episode of Search Off the Record, he brought up the advice to turn content into bite-sized chunks for LLMs and said, “we don’t want you to do that.”

Still, look at what that same guide asks for. It tells you to write for your human audience, keep the page easy to follow, and organize it “by paragraphs and sections, along with headings that provide a clear structure.” That is most of what the citation studies measured.

So Google and the studies only disagree about who the structure is for, and I side with Google. Plenty of SEOs will argue with me on that, since Sullivan himself admitted chunking seems to work in some edge cases. I would not build a store’s content on an edge case Google has already said it does not want.

Write for the Shopper in a Hurry

Writing for the shopper in a hurry covers both audiences, since a skimming person and a retrieval system are hunting for the same passage. Nielsen Norman Group measured that visitors read at most 28% of the words on an average page visit, and 20% is more likely.

So picture a collection page for running socks. A shopper wants to know if they are cushioned and whether they slip at the heel, and an AI system answering “best socks for a half marathon” wants those same two facts near the top. Write the page for her and the machine gets what it needs on the same pass, which is the rule I follow when I write AI product descriptions.

That overlap is the whole trick. Put the answer where a stranger in a hurry would look for it: near the top of the page, under a heading that names her question. Do that and Indig’s 44.2% number takes care of itself, with no theory about machines required.

Specifics do the rest of the work. The GEO paper from researchers at Princeton and IIT Delhi tested nine tactics across 10,000 queries, and adding statistics, quotations, and cited sources lifted visibility in generative answers by up to 40%. “Our fleece is 320 gsm and tested to 20 degrees” beats a paragraph of adjectives for both readers.

Where “Write for People” Falls Short

“Write for people” falls short in one place: writing is the smaller lever. SE Ranking’s AI Mode study found that a domain’s traffic mattered about three times more than anything on the page.

That same study shows how thin the writing tricks are. Pages with an FAQ block averaged 4.9 citations against 4.4 without one, and question-style titles barely moved the number. A well-written page on a store nobody has heard of still loses to an average page on a store people search for by name, and that gap is most of why ChatGPT recommends some brands and skips others.

There is also a line you can cross. Google’s guide says that making content for every variation of a search, done mainly to manipulate AI responses, violates its scaled content abuse policy. Writing for the machine first is behind most of the AEO mistakes that cost citations. A short FAQ at the bottom of a product page is fine, but forty near-identical posts chasing forty phrasings is exactly what that policy describes.

So when a store asks me where to spend, the writing gets fixed once and the rest of the effort goes into being known. My AI search services run in that order: clean up the top pages first, then earn the mentions that make a brand worth citing.

Run Two Tests Before You Publish

Two tests before you publish tell you whether a page works for people and for AI: skim it, then read it out loud. Indig found 53% of ChatGPT citations came from the middle of a paragraph, so no formula for sentence placement will rescue a page that fails either one. Both tests work the same on a draft a model wrote, and I cover the Google side of that in is AI content bad for SEO.

For the first test, read only your headings and the first couple of lines under each. If that skeleton answers the title’s question, a skimmer gets what she came for, and so does anything retrieving passages.

After that, read one middle section aloud. If it sounds like a person who has handled the product, shoppers will trust it, and if it sounds like a form letter, they leave even when the page gets crawled. On a store blog, that second test is most of what I mean by Shopify blog SEO.

One more thing: write the first sentence last. Draft the section, ask what a stranger would want to know first, and move that sentence up. On a product page it is usually who the item is for and what it does better than the cheaper version.

Want Posts That Earn Clicks and Citations?

Writing for AI or for people was never a real choice for a store. Google says to write for people, the citation data rewards pages a hurried reader can use, and the bigger win sits in being a brand worth citing.

If your posts are earning neither, book a call and I’ll read one of your posts with you and show you which passages a skimmer and an AI system would both lift, and which ones they’d skip. If you want that handled every month, that is what my AI search services are for.