The More Things Change: Why AI-Friendly Content Is Just Good Content

Last week I attended Cody Chomiak's webinar "The AI advantage - transforming how we work and innovate." It was incredibly informative, and a bit of a relief to hear that I wasn't the only one feeling "AI vertigo" - that we're all behind on what this means for brands, and just trying to catch up.

Cody had so many great insights to share, but as the webinar progressed, the thing that struck me most was the similarities I kept finding between how we're now approaching AI-friendly content, and the way I've been working on SEO with clients for more than a decade.

We've Been Here Before

SEO (search engine optimization) is all about trying to get your website to rank highly in search results. I have been building websites for over 15 years, and of course clients want to get their sites ranking high for relevant searches. If you're a plumber, and someone in your area is searching "plumber," ideally you want to be the top site to show up, or at least in the first few.

So people would say to me, "you can make us be #1 on Google, right?"

And I would say, "Nope."

In the wild west days of the earlier internet, there was any number of "black hat" ways to try and trick Google into ranking your site first. The specifics of these aren't important, but they were all designed to try and make the digital robots that "read" your site think it was really relevant so it would rank higher.

But then Google got smarter. Their algorithms evolved to identify these tricks and penalize sites using them. Why? Because these tactics were delivering sites that weren't genuinely useful to real people. As Google's bots became more sophisticated, they got better at seeing websites the way a human would see them—evaluating whether the content actually satisfied what users were searching for.

You know what became better than trying to trick Google into ranking your site higher? Building a better, more useful site.

The Heart of Search Hasn't Changed

Google has one ultimate goal (beyond making money, that's a discussion for a different day): to deliver the most useful content to the person searching. That's it. They want to give them the best website for their search, so they find what they need easily and have a good experience and come back to use Google again another time. That's how they keep their customers and make their billions and all the rest.

So the best way to get your site to #1 on Google? Be the most useful site for that search.

There's complexities and technicalities to this, of course, but I would tell my clients "if you want to rank #1 for 'best emergency plumber in Winnipeg' ARE you really the best emergency plumber in Winnipeg with the most useful website for emergency plumbing services? No? Well then, let's redesign your site so you are, or set our expectations accordingly."

(Case in point: one client who wanted to rank highly for emergency services didn't want their phone number listed on the site. They only wanted to receive email enquiries, and answer them during regular business hours. Were they ever going to be the best site for an emergency problem? Absolutely not.)

Enter AI: Different Tech, Same Goal

Increasingly, we're not building our websites just for search engines to crawl. We're building them for AI to crawl.

Cody reported that website traffic is expected to dip 20-50% in the next year or two. Up to 50% fewer people looking at your site! What are they going to be doing instead? Asking ChatGPT. Why search Google for the answers when AI can provide you a tailored, comprehensive answer much more quickly?

We are entering the "answer economy" - the brands who have the best answers to people's questions will be the ones who win.

The recommendation for moving forward? Creating content that directly answers what people are asking. In other words, actually being the best result for any given search.

Sound familiar?

Full Circle

The reason "black hat" SEO tactics stopped working was because Google's bots (the computer programs that "read" your website) got better at acting like real humans.

Instead of just seeing how many times a keyword appeared on your page or reading text you'd hidden from everyone else, it got better at looking at your page the way a human being would. Did it actually answer the query the user had? Would it give them the information they'd been searching for so they didn't have to go somewhere else? The better the bots got at assessing like a human, the better they were able to deliver the right results to real humans.

You know how Google's main goal is to give you the best results for your search? That's AI's goal too. And just like Google, the better AI gets at understanding humans, the more it'll interact with your site like a real human.

Which means that even if real humans are not coming to your site anymore, AI actually wants you to provide content that is designed to answer real human questions.

It wants you to create the most useful site for humans even if few humans will ever see it.

The Delicious Irony

So here's the paradox that might just save us all from AI anxiety: The most AI-friendly site you can build is the one that is actually the best, most useful site for humans.

Feel counter-intuitive? It shouldn't. We've been training AI to think like people, understand people, and serve people. That's the entire point. And the better the machines get at "seeing" something the way a human would, the less we need to consider how to make content "AI-friendly."

The secret to thriving in this new frontier isn't some technical trick or algorithm hack. It's the same thing it's always been:

Serve humans first. AI will follow.