Someone posted on social media about their experience writing in-depth and insightful articles last year and was pleasantly surprised to see that the AI relied on and even referenced their articles. Their secret was to choose very specific topics, which is a good idea.
SEO and natural language AI
SEOs love writing articles based on keywords, and that’s actually how people did it back in the caveman days of SEO, well over 25 years ago. Natural language processing has come a long way and LLMs are now able to understand topics and questions in a conversational manner. So it’s really outdated to do SEO by focusing on keywords.
User behavior and what other sites and people say about a site or product are increasingly important. The best way to influence this is to use insightful content that gives users what they’re looking for, and a lot of it, as often as possible.
It’s not just about being insightful
The person who started the discussion pointed out that they chose a “specific enough topic” and wrote something interesting about it. This is deceptively simple advice, but it’s one of the key points of writing for an audience of humans and machines who interpret the content as if they were humans.
Choosing a topic that is specific enough means keeping the article focused on one topic and not letting it get lost. One of the hallmarks of good writing is the willingness to remove elements that tend to stray from the topic. This is an American style of writing, although Europeans, as far back as Charles Dickens, knew the importance of staying on topic so that the effect is a steady stream of interesting sentences that carry the reader to the end of the page.
Writing is an art, like painting and composing music. But you don’t need to have a degree in literature or journalism to engage users with text.
How someone received a lot of love from Claude AI
Bluesky user @danabra.mov shared his experience by writing an insightful article which Claude AI then began to reference.
He job:
“If you write an insightful blog post on a specific enough topic and people link to it, you have a real chance of influencing everyone’s LLM results in a year or so. It’s a bit crazy.
I wrote a few articles last year that I thought no one would read because they were so long. And now I see Claude regurgitating what I wrote in those articles in a perfectly condensed way (and sometimes explicitly referencing the articles). they took away exactly what I wanted the reader to take away!
For me, this is a relief because I was afraid of the decline in interest in long-form blogs and the decline in readership. but in one sense it may have grown considerably! It’s just that my reader is now infinitely patient and really wants to hear everything.
Others agree that being specific is the key to success with AI quotes
The response to Dan’s post was overwhelmingly positive, with one person saying it gave them hope.
A person named Tyler said he had a similar experience with specific content he posted.
@tylergaw.com replied:
“I’ve seen a few of mine, not even very insightful, just specific, get in there and used in about 6 months. Wild.”
The person who started the discussion, Dan, agreed:
“I mean, yes, but I think being precise in itself is enough…”
Why is it enough to be specific?
Based on my more than forty years of writing experience, including writing poems, short stories, a novel, blog posts, and articles for Search Engine Journal, my opinion on the subject is that focusing on specificity helps keep a work focused in a way that matches the reader’s attention. As soon as the article strays from the topic, the reader loses interest and moves away.
Being insightful is not enough. Being witty or clever is nice in moderation, but in larger doses it becomes irrelevant and will, in my opinion, lose the reader. This is why anyone writing content must be willing to ruthlessly delete words to keep it focused and specific (on topic).
What Google said on the subject
Google’s John Mueller reposted Dan’s post with the comment:
“Create more insightful and useful content.”
There was a skeptic in the crowd who argued that economics removed the incentive to work.
They wrote:
“Why on earth would anyone put in the effort required at this point and then immediately have the item stolen, without receiving any compensation or credit. It has never been a more hostile to be a creative environment. The economics DO NOT WORK.”
Yes, it’s true that the current environment is hostile to creators because of AI. Yet there is always an opportunity for success in writing about the topics that interest you, because they will certainly interest someone else.
Featured image by Shutterstock/Nur Alam sabuz
