Your quest to show up in AI search results is making your content less desirable to the humans consuming it.
You’re probably alienating your human readers whenever you create Answering Engine Optimization (AEO) or Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) content.
In case you’re not up-to-date on your digital marketing jargon, AEO content is content that’s designed to be found by Google, Bing, and other search engines to answer queries in their featured snippets (i.e., those blocks of information at the top of their search results). This content is typically structured to provide concise answers to questions people ask through search engines.
GEO content, on the other hand, is content designed to be discovered, digested, and regurgitated or cited by AI platforms like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Claude. GEO content is often structured in a way that makes it easier for those platforms to “understand” the substance of the topic being discussed in the content.
(That being said, the terms are often used interchangeably, and many AEO/GEO experts would tell you that there’s not much difference between writing AEO content versus GEO content.)
Whether the content is AEO content or GEO content, when you write content based on “best practices” for AEO or GEO, you’re writing to impress machines.
But to do so, you’ll almost certainly be writing in a style that could turn off and alienate your human readers, which is, of course, the opposite of what your writing should do.
Here are three reasons why your AEO/GEO content is alienating your human readers.
The structure of your AEO/GEO content is alienating your readers
First, the structure you’re using in AEO/GEO content is probably not helping your readers digest and understand what you’re discussing.
You know what I’m talking about: lots of short sentences and paragraphs, lots of bullet points, and lots of subheadings.
With this structure, there’s so much information coming at the reader. Multiple numbered and bulleted lists make it hard for readers to process what they’re seeing. It’s like their (our) brains can’t catch their cognitive breath because their (our) eyes are jumping from one written thought to the next with minimal explanation or transitions.
Compare that to a typical article where there’ll likely be subheadings and short paragraphs with one, two, or three sentences. As readers (we) work through the paragraphs and sentences, they—no matter their length—provide a cognitive buffer that helps readers (us) digest and retain the information being shared.
And don’t get me started about the FAQs at the end of many AEO/GEO articles. The author might consider them “frequently asked,” but who’s really asking them?
These FAQs do not provide a service to readers; they’re just repeating what was discussed earlier in the article. These FAQs are *really* just opportunities for you to appeal to AI bots by structuring content the way you think makes it easy for them to consume the content and present it down the road.
The density of your AEO/GEO content is alienating your readers
The articles you’re writing to get noticed by AI platforms are simply too dense. They’re providing too much information to your readers—an amount of information that’s well beyond what a reader needs to know to get value out of the article.
We all know why you’re doing it: you want to show AI platforms that you’re knowledgeable and authoritative about the topic you’re covering, and thus, the article you’re writing is knowledgeable and authoritative about the topic it’s covering and should be cited by AI platforms.
One way to do that is to write an article that’s 1500, 2000, or 3000 words long that covers all that there is to cover about a topic.
But in most cases, a reader shouldn’t need to wade through 1000+ words worth of background regarding a topic before getting to the meat of an article. You’re rubbing your readers the wrong way when you force them to work their way through truckloads of words to get to the part that’s most valuable to them.
Sure, they could skim your article and jump from subhead to subhead to subhead. (You included subheads, right?!) But you’re not doing yourself any favors by forcing your readers to read more words than necessary so that you can impress AI platforms.
The vanilla-ness of your AEO/GEO content is alienating your readers
Finally, and on a related note, the boring tone and style of your AEO/GEO content is unlikely to win over many fans.
Let’s be honest, a lot of the content you’re writing for AEO/GEO purposes is uninteresting. It doesn’t draw the reader in. It’s almost like you’re forgetting that there are humans on the other side of the internet who might be reading your content.
Because you focused on using the article as a content delivery device for AI platforms and not as a means to engage readers, you kept the content straightforward and neutral. Yes, you met your goal of giving the AI bots information. And yes, a human reader could learn something from the article.
But the article isn’t enjoyable to read. You’ve made reading it a chore.
Compare that to what it’s like when you read an engaging article—you get sucked in, you breeze through the article, and you probably want to read more articles and content from that author.
When you create AEO/GEO content, however, you sacrifice the opportunity to connect with human readers by prioritizing connecting with AI bots.
You do you with AEO/GEO content, but you could be turning off would-be readers
I understand why you and many others are creating AEO/GEO content right now. You’re reading articles and social media posts that claim the number of searches on AI platforms is making a serious dent in the number of Google searches, and you don’t want to be left in the dark. You want your and your organization’s content to show up in these searches.
On one hand, we’re still in the early days of determining whether AEO and GEO will be effective. There *is* reason to believe that AEO and GEO will be as valuable to organizations’ marketing as SEO (search engine optimization) was and still is.
But it would be foolish to focus your content creation efforts on appealing to AI in a way that alienates your human readers.
After all, for the foreseeable future, humans are still the ones who are deciding which professionals they should hire, and they’re still the ones who are authorizing payments for the invoices those professionals send them for their services.
Thinking about bringing on an outside writer to help your law firm strategize and create compelling thought-leadership marketing and business development content? Click here to schedule a 30-minute Content Strategy Audit to learn if collaborating with an outside writer is the right move for you and your firm.