Write for Humans, Not Search Engines

There is an obvious tension in publishing this on a site engineered to be found by Google and quoted by AI answer engines. I do not think there is a conflict, and the reason is the whole point of this article.

Rule one: your readers are humans

When you write, remember who receives it. A person, usually distracted, usually on a phone, deciding within a second or two whether this is about them.

Copy written for an algorithm has a texture you can feel immediately: the phrase repeated more often than any human would, the sentence bent around a keyword, the paragraph that exists to hit a length. It reads like it was assembled rather than said.

Here is why this is not a sacrifice. Search has spent years getting better at rewarding the thing a person actually wanted, and answer engines are built to extract and quote clear, direct explanations.

Writing plainly for a human and writing to be found have converged. The people still gaming the old version are optimising for a machine that has moved on.

Rule two: one headline can carry everything

In a sea of information, a single well-written headline makes the difference between the work being read and the work being invisible.

That is a slightly brutal fact about publishing. You can write something genuinely excellent and lose to something mediocre with a better opening line, and no amount of complaining changes it.

The headline is not decoration on the work, it is the thing that decides whether the work exists for that reader.

So spend disproportionate time there. If the piece took two hours, the headline deserves more than the two minutes it usually gets.

Rule three: sell without selling

The best copy is not trying to sell you something. It allows you to sell without selling, which sounds like wordplay and is a real mechanism.

What it means practically: be so genuinely useful that the reader concludes on their own that you know what you are doing. You are not making a case for yourself, you are demonstrating something and letting them draw the obvious inference.

The conclusion they reach themselves is far more durable than the one you push at them.

This is the written version of proof over promise, which is the same argument as show don't tell.

Rule four: it is communication, not writing

Copywriting is not about writing. It is about communicating authentically, and those are different skills that get confused constantly.

Plenty of beautifully written copy communicates nothing, because it was optimised for how it sounds. Plenty of plain, slightly clumsy writing lands hard, because the person meant it and the reader can tell.

If you have ever explained something well to a client in a room, you can already do this. The difficulty is resisting the urge to become a Writer when you sit down.

Rule five: authentic is not enough on its own

An authentic voice wins over the long run. That is true and it is incomplete, and the incompleteness is where most people come unstuck.

Being authentic once does nothing. You have to communicate it consistently, day in and day out, for long enough that the voice becomes recognisable.

Be persistent, be consistent, and when you falter, own it and move on rather than disappearing for six weeks out of embarrassment.

How long is long enough is the ninety days rule.

The consistency problem has one real fix

People ask how to produce consistently without it becoming a grind, and there is only one honest answer: write about something you are genuinely interested in.

If you actually care about the subject you will produce authentic, valuable material without straining. If you do not, every piece is extraction and the reader can feel the effort.

That is not a discipline problem to solve with a system. It is a subject problem, and the fix is choosing differently.

What this means now that writing is free

Every one of these rules got more important the moment competent prose became instant and costless.

When adequate writing was scarce, being able to produce it was an advantage in itself. It is not any more.

What survives is the part a machine cannot supply: a specific person who did a specific thing and has a view about it. The rules above all point at that same thing from different angles.

So the response to writing becoming free is not to write less. It is to put more of the irreplaceable part into what you write, which mostly means more of you and fewer general truths.

Let the person show up in it

Be yourself and let your personality into the writing. Be confident, be interested, be specific.

Readers respond to a person having a view far more than to a competent neutral summary, of which there is now an infinite supply produced at no cost.

That last point matters more every month. When adequate writing is free and instant, the only remaining scarcity is somebody who has actually done the thing and is willing to say what they think about it.

The five, together

Write for the person. Earn the click with the headline.

Be useful enough that you do not have to sell. Communicate rather than perform.

Then keep doing it long enough for anyone to notice.

None of that is a trick, which is why it still works.