Originally published on our Medium blog – AI search writing tips
Text content creation is going through massive changes together with all of SEO and online marketing.
Looks like the regular web search we’re used to will eventually shift toAI tools, especially considering that even Google is now hell-bent on becoming an LLM.
The user behavior shift is already here — people are really comfortable running searches in ChatGPT, Grok, Claude, or Perplexity rather than Google or Bing (who used it anyway?)
Whether it’s good or bad is not the point; as a business, you have to adapt.
This is where most of your organic SEO traffic will go soon:
You need to make changes to your content strategy and production, and you need to make them fast, that’s why we’ve added the AI search audit service to things we do.
Here’s a list of changes to make:
1) No more “SEO content”
The SEO writing some of you focused on needs to die before anything else can grow.
If you scrape a bunch of keywords, split them into groups by relevance, and turn them into blog post titles, you are already behind.
Sure, you may still get some results for a while, but it’s inefficient and you will be playing catch-up.
“Create mags, not sites” is something I wrote previously to explain the shift, check it out.
2) Thought leadership content is your battering ram
When writing with AI search in mind, your goal is to, ideally, get into the training data that AI uses.
Every once in a while each LLM is getting retrained on new data.
We don’t know how often that happens, since all the AI companies keep that to themselves, but we know for sure that this will happen more and more often, eventually becoming seamless.
Their training data is based on authority, innovation, and freshness.
Considering that, you can’t just keep rehashing existing content pieces and hope to be picked.
In fact, that’s great news for human writers, because
you can’t get into AI search results by producing AI content.
Instead, you have to focus on human, thought leadership content.
The term sounds intimidating, but it’s really just a buzzword for any topic you’re early to cover.
Expertise in any industry can be spun into thought leadership content.
That means pieces that are based on
- unique research,
- data, stats, and visualizations,
- controversial takes and hit pieces,
- latest events and developments (e.g. news and regulations overview),
- much much more.
See our thought leadership content case study with examples for more ideas.
3) Ride on the coattails
This stems from the same logic as the tip above.
To get into the AI tools’ training data, you need to get your brand as close as possible to the current authority pool.
Until you become an authority yourself, you need to cite authority sources.
And don’t just paste Wikipedia links here and there. Instead, cite the sources that AI tools already quote.
While you’re at it, make sure your brand looks big and has a strong online presence. See the parts on branding and authority signaling in this post.
Fake it till you make it is in season again — have all the profiles, publications, press releases, and mentions you can get!
4) Get smarter with content planning
Smart content planning is the backbone of thought leadership content production.
Just like you can’t get ahead with AI-generated text, you can’t afford to use AI for content planning either.
As a business owner, you have to get strategic and think about where your industry is going. Use your practice-based intuition.
As a writer, you have to sit down with a business owner and let them speak more. Brainstorm, see what the competition is doing, extrapolate, and transfer to other areas.
Understand the target market and their needs; look for angles to approach them from.
If you need help creating a future-proof AI-friendly content plan for your thought leadership campaign, get in touch with us!
5) Nail down search intent!
Why are the people searching for things you want to come up in AI citations for?
Are they looking to compare features, or are they looking for a good deal?
Understand and reflect search intent in your content. Make sure that one page does not confuse several intents and audiences, and create separate landers for different purposes.
6) Get to the point
Keep your posts short, no one is reading anything for longer than a minute in 2025 (15 seconds per page is what you get! 🤯)
Forget introductions and conclusions, get to the point, answer the question, and have a clear call to action.
Keep your posts clean, airy, and scannable.
7) Internalize the logic & behaviors of AI search
People are using AI to ask specific things, and they try to include all the necessary data in their prompts.
Most AI searches are basically long-tail, hyperlocal keywords.
E.g.:
Workout equipment for postpartum moms in Indianapolis under $2000
Most third-party tools won’t help you find these keywords.
One way to find these queries is to dig them out while running a Google Search Console audit of your website if you’ve been blogging for a while (you have, right?)
Another way to find these angles is, again, to sit down and talk with the business owner or someone experienced in the niche more often.
The main takeaway — make sure your text is as detailed as possible and matches the searcher’s demands.
8) Have your old-school pillars
Even though your focus should be on short and focused thought leadership pieces, you still need to cover all your “SEO” bases if you haven’t yet.
All the major features of your product or service, the main problems it solves, the biggest pains of your target market — all of that needs to be packed into large old-school posts and guides.
Two main reasons for that:
- AI tools still use SEO results as their training data, e.g. Google’s AI assistant Gemini is using the old organic search results under the hood to present an answer for you;
- As you get noticed for your thought leadership pieces and your domain authority grows, you will be showcased as a source for more and more queries. The best-case scenario is you start coming up for higher-volume, more popular searches.
Evolve with the industry
Times of change offer great opportunities for those who stay open-minded.
Most of the tips above come down to old-school evergreen marketing stuff, albeit with a modern twist.
Make sure your brand is widely present and authoritative, have an understanding of your market, become a thought leader, write clearly, and stick to the point.
Make a conscious effort to future-proof your content before it’s too late!