People-First Content in the Age of AI

Even in the age of AI, your content is supposed to be about connecting with people.

There’s no denying that AI has changed the face of content creation. It’s re-prioritizing search result pages. It’s quickly saturating nearly every market with hundreds of posts. It’s sending tidal waves through the industry. What industry? At this point, you can pretty much just pick one. 

As major players have re-orientated themselves, online content creation has seen some drastic changes. Still, there are some essentials that haven’t changed. 

The most crucial responsibility of your content, whether it be a blog, a newsletter, or a service page, is to connect with your customer base. Even in the age of AI and algorithms, that means that your content needs to be readable, digestible, and high-quality to a human audience. Yes, your posts should be search-optimized and accessible to crawlers—but, most importantly, they should be people-first. 

Reader Optimization vs. Search Engine Optimization 

In a world where search ranking = clickthroughs = connection = customers, it’s easy to overlook the actual readers. People-first content, which is designed with readers in mind, not algorithms, aims to be both readable and searchable—but it means sacrificing some of the more surface-level tactics for increasing your content’s place on the SERPs. Keyword stuffing, link farming, duplicating content, and anything else that might be considered a “black hat” SEO tactic don’t have much of a place in people-first content. 

So, do we have to choose between the rankings and the readers? Not exactly. The relationship between the algorithm, SEO content, and reader-first content has always been muddy, an effect that’s only been heightened by the rise of AI. However, there are a few bona fide resources we can rely on. In their official guide on search ranking and SEO, Google wrote: 

“Google’s automated ranking systems are designed to present helpful, reliable information that’s primarily created to benefit people, not to gain search engine rankings, in the top Search results.”

Which means that search engine optimization and reader optimization may actually have a lot in common. As Google’s algorithms continually evolve, it turns out that those black hat SEO tactics may not really do much to improve your rankings—all the while damaging your company’s credibility with your clients. Shallow advice, repetitive content, and awkward writing, no matter how many keywords are included, don’t resonate with readers, and, therefore, may get passed over by crawler bots. 

High-quality, immersive content prioritizes people.

When it comes down to it, the guidelines for creating people-first content are hauntingly reminiscent of the code for making good content. Google’s famous EEAT standards are probably the simplest and most helpful guides for people-first content. It stands for expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Consider your reader. Step into your rhetorical shoes. What do they actually want from your content, and how can you make it engaging? Create a unique voice, incorporate quality research, and include expertise, either from your personal experience or that of others. Regularly publish, but don’t overcrowd your system or your readers with unnecessary filler. Develop a rapport and establish your company’s savvy. 

By making these shifts in how you think about your content, you’re more likely to address questions your readers might actually have. It gives you the chance to connect in the long-term and encourages return visitors to your site—a key to customer retention. Over the past few years, I’ve written a few monthly blogs for a green cleaning laundry detergent brand. Based on my last communique with the team, a majority of their site traffic comes through their email newsletters for the blogs. That’s right—even when it’s just a SEO-trained writer unassisted by a single key term-loving AI. Of course, that brings us to the crux of the issue. 

Can a Bot Write for Readers? 

To say that AI is quickly evolving could be the understatement of the millennium. I doubt that any period of human history has demonstrated Moore’s Law so effectively. From one month to another (or even less time, as implied by the very existence of the news outlet AI Weekly), AI can make a drastic leap. It seems that generative AI is passing another revolutionary threshold every other week. A new saying will probably come from this day and age: the fastest way to be disproven in two weeks is estimating AI’s capabilities. 

With that in mind, I impose very few limits on AI’s future. Can an AI write people-first content? In some ways, it already is. Currently, even the most basic generative AI is producing highly believable content that answers complex questions in-depth. From the human perspective, AI is veering towards people-first content at a breakneck page—though there are a few notable bumps in the road. 

Like any tool, AI must be used to carefully to maintain quality and create truly people-first content.

Let’s measure AI up against Google’s EEAT. Can an AI have expertise? What about experience? Authority? Trust? Most generative AIs have access to the entire record of online human experience, it’s true. But they cannot have experience. Authority comes from author credibility. Trustworthiness requires a dedication to truth that AIs do not currently have, as they’re more inclined to give false information than admit ignorance. 

This doesn’t mean that AI content won’t resonate with your audience. It just can’t do it alone—at least, not yet.

As for the algorithm, Google insists that their rankings don’t take AI generation into account. Since we don’t know everything about their algorithm, and probably never will, we have to take their word for it. Still, we can be pretty sure about the basics. Google says that original, people-first content will rank higher on their SERPs. That means originality. Is AI unoriginal? Not always. But neither is it perfect.  Plugging a prompt into Chat GPT and content-bombing your company’s blog won’t do you any favors in the long run. That’s right—even right now. 

Additional Guidelines for People-First Content

If you’re looking to boost your content strategy, here are a few additional guidelines that may help you keep your content people-first. 

• Could it be copied and pasted to another website and make sense? It may not reflect the tone, voice, and mission of your organization. 

• Does it say something new? Regurgitating the same content on the first SERP won’t help you gain rankings. Try incorporating new information and adding valuable resources to your content. 

• Does it flow? If you’re more focused on meeting a keyword count than creating quality content, your blogs and service pages will fall flat with your audience and the algorithm. 

In the debate on AI generation and people-first content, I would like to imply a potential future trend. In a world of robots using human voices, truly human content may come in short supply. Business moguls know what that means—it could become increasingly valuable. Don’t underestimate the power of actually good content for connecting with your customer base in a lasting and impactful way. 

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