Write for the User, the Machine Follows: On-Page Best Practices in the Age of Generated Content

Author: Ben Trigueiro / Senior SEO Consultant @ Flow Agency / LinkedIn

Here’s a tough pill to swallow: most of the traffic that disappeared this past year was never doing anything for you in the first place. You just couldn’t see that, because the traffic number was going up.

As someone whose career has centred around top-of-funnel content, it’s been an especially bitter pill for me to swallow.

But instead of wallowing in what was lost, I’ve overhauled how I approach and think about content entirely. I started by asking myself: How do you optimize content that people will actually want to read when the user can generate the content themselves?

The vanity metrics were always covering this up

Traffic is down for almost everybody. Some brands that weren’t publishing much before are getting more now, but brands that built their systems in the old era are almost universally down now.

But here’s the strange part: most organic conversions are about the same. It’s a pattern I’ve seen repeated across industries and contexts.

That gap tells an important story about how much value this content really had. Pre-AI-Overviews, we were dealing with pure vanity metrics. We were publishing content nobody actually engaged with, and it produced traffic because there was nothing else to read. Marketing teams and the executives they reported to were happy with that, because the numbers go up.

So while you see everyone on every corner proclaiming the death of content’s value in the AI search era, the truth is this value was always just a mirage. One that was consistently leading content strategists astray. Publishing content still has tons of value, and it still generates visibility. It’s the same value it was always producing; you just couldn’t see it because it was buried under the noise of vanity metrics.

The catch is that there is now nowhere for your bad content to hide. Your main competitor isn’t another publisher. It’s the content the user can generate for themselves in three seconds. And the content that used to generate vanity value no longer has a fake reason to exist.

There’s only one solution. You need to start publishing stuff people actually want to read. Groundbreaking, I know.

The fundamentals aren’t changing, but the floor is rising

Good news: the fundamentals of building content that’s visible in organic search and in AI-generated responses are not new. What made content visible before is still what makes it visible now. On-page, off-page, site structure, authority; it’s the same playbook, with some important caveats.

You do not need to throw out your old SEO best practices. But you do need to modernize them.

Because here’s where most people are getting stuck. Their best-practices list still looks something like this:

• Structured content with H2s, H3s, bullets, and tables.
• Main keyword in the first paragraph; supporting keywords in headings.
• Fluff-free, direct answers for snippets and AI overviews.
• Contextual internal linking.
• Statistics from authoritative sources to build authority.
• Include images and graphics.

There is nothing technically wrong with that list. Follow it, and you will get perfectly optimized content.

You will also get content that is bland, forgettable, and without long-term value. It’s the content equivalent of liminal space. A perfectly plated dish that tastes like a microwave dinner. It does not connect with the reader, and therefore it cannot build the kind of relationship you would later leverage into a sale. Which is, of course, the entire point of publishing in the first place.

This was always a problem. The vanity metrics covered it up. Now it is what almost everybody is rushing to publish en masse: perfectly optimized, superficial crap.

Make SEO the output, not the input

The fix to not publishing perfectly optimized crap isn’t a new checklist. It’s reframing the one you already have so that every item exists to serve the reader. Same checklist but with human-first execution. The SEO becomes the side effect. Like putting bitter greens into a fruit smoothie.

Here’s how you can reframe that same basic checklist I shared before into something that is fundamentally human-focused, but produces the same results:

Structured content with H2s/H3s, bullets, tables → Design an information hierarchy. Sections should be modular and scope-constrained; one idea each. Bullets for steps and options. Tables for comparisons. The structure exists to help someone read your page, not to give a crawler something to chew on.

Keyword in first paragraph; supporting keywords in headings → Use headings that are direct, specific, accurately describe the section, and logically flow from the previous one. If your H2s read like a coherent table of contents instead of a keyword shopping list, you have already won the on-page game.

Fluff-free, direct answers for snippets → Answer first, then expand. Give the minimally viable direct answer up top, then layer in examples, edge cases, decision points, and failure modes. That serves a reader in a hurry and a reader who actually wants to understand the topic – and it makes it easy for machines to integrate into a generate response too.

Contextual internal linking → Link to supporting content. Prerequisites, next steps, troubleshooting, deeper dives. The context around the link should make the relationship obvious. (Quick tip: don’t overcomplicate finding internal link targets. Site-search your own domain for the topic; your best pages to link to are at the top of that list. If you can’t find anything to link – now you know where to focus your publishing efforts)

Statistics from authoritative sources → Ask what statistics, research, and trends are actually important for understanding this topic. Then cite original sources as much as possible.

Include images and graphics → Use visuals to compress complexity. Workflows, decision trees, comparison matrices, annotated examples. Alt text describes what it is and why it’s there.

Do that and you get the exact same outputs the old checklist was chasing: structure, scannability, machine-readability.  But it’s implemented in such a way that forces the writer to have empathy for the person reading. Drop those reframes into whatever content-generation system you’re running and watch the output change dramatically.

“AI visibility hacks” are mostly just rebranded writing principles

“But what about those new best practices I keep reading about” I hear you asking. Chunking. Bottom Line Up Front. These are everywhere right now. They’re also nothing new.

Chunking is paragraphs. We figured out paragraphs were useful back when Romans were writing on walls (literally walls of text, no spaces, no breaks, miserable to read). Some smart Roman decided paragraphs were necessary and we have been in their debt ever since.

Bottom Line Up Front is “don’t bury the lede.” It’s a journalism principle that says put the most important thing first. Might also make your content less terrible, incidentally.

These things make your content easy to read, give it energy, keep it structured. They are solved problems. The real hack is to read a good style guide. I keep The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. on my desk.  It has been infinitely more valuable for producing sustainably visible, valuable content than any hack I’ve ever encountered on LinkedIn.

What machines can’t generate: information gain

Everything above gets you to the new baseline. It does not get you visible. Because the user can generate the baseline themselves now. 

To go beyond what they have immediately on hand, you need the four things AI tools cannot manufacture out of thin air:

• Nuance: warnings, caveats, edge cases.
• Experience: what actually happens when you try the thing.
• Perspective: an informed point of view only you can offer.
• Guidance: if X is happening, this is the fix.

This is the mythical E-E-A-T everyone tries to optimize for. You can’t optimize for it, because it isn’t a setting. It is the substance of the page. It’s the main ingredient of “non-commodity” content that Google is now saying to focus on (I guess the term “helpful” content developed too much baggage).

Here’s a little anecdote of how EEAT in content helped meI learned to ice skate as an adult. There is a difficult maneuver early on where you have to get up on your outside edge and lean over. It’s scary. You fall. I must have watched a hundred YouTube videos explaining how to do it. They all said the exact same thing. And it was really frustrating because none of them helped break through the barriers I was hitting by trying to follow their advice.

Then I found one that said: “If your skate is wobbling, it’s because you’re too far back on your heel. Lean forward. If you’re struggling to really get on the edge, it’s because you’re standing too straight. Get into your knees more.” 

This was the first content creator I’d found in this topic who actually bothered to walk through all of this. Without knowing it, he was demonstrating his expertise and experience in actually teaching someone how to skate on their outside edge. 

That’s guidance. That’s perspective. It goes past information delivery and tells you what you actually need to know so you can stand up from your computer and go do the thing. I watched that video probably 200 times because it actually worked. That is information gain. That is what makes a page uniquely valuable, and it is what both Google and the LLMs are looking for to make their results worth showing.

The good news: it has never been easier to put information gain into your content. Don’t be rushing to build AI-powered content systems that help you write the same content but faster. Instead, design them to pull and synthesize from the unique thought-leadership reservoir you are sitting on and aren’t using: Old content that never got traffic, webinar transcripts, podcast transcripts, case studies, original data, help docs. Use the AI tool of your choice to synthesize it. Layer it into your pages. It’s a giant opportunity that most teams are leaving on the table as they rush to scale their crap no one wants to read.

Write for the user, the machine follows

The pitch is simple.

Write for the user first. Machine interpretability follows from clear, well-structured prose. This is a solved problem.

Reframe every SEO tactic around the reader’s experience. Same checklist, human-first execution.

Don’t get distracted by optimization hacks. Chunking is just good structure. Someone already fixed that one for us a couple thousand years ago.

Layer in nuance, experience, perspective, and guidance. The information gain only you can provide.

One honest caveat: this isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme. You won’t start pulling in traffic overnight. You will need to do a lot more than this to rank for competitive topics, and even more to turn readers into customers. But this is the baseline that makes everything else possible. Skip it and the rest doesn’t matter.

Everything that’s better for humans is better for machines. That’s the whole game now.