How to write content for AI

Use plain, natural language

Write the way your customers speak, not the way your internal teams document things. Formal, corporate, or overly technical phrasing puts distance between the customer's question and your content. AI has to work harder to bridge that gap, and it does not always succeed.

Example: If a customer would say, "I want to cancel my subscription," the article should include the words "cancel" and "subscription." The phrase "initiate a termination workflow for your service agreement" is not as helpful.

Provide context, not keywords

An older approach to search optimization was to sprinkle keywords into content so an article showed up in results. That approach does not work for AI-powered search, and it can bring AI performance down.

AI groups related information together based on meaning instead of word matching. To make a concept findable, do not repeat the keyword; explain the concept in context.

Example:

Before: A bakery's cake ordering page mentions "frosting" throughout, but a customer searches for "icing" and gets no useful result. An author adds this line to the bottom of the page: "Keywords: icing, frosting, sugar, decoration"

After: The article explains the concept in context: "We offer several types of frosting and icing for our cakes, including buttercream, cream cheese, and fondant. Frosting and icing serve the same purpose as a sweet coating on the outside of the cake, and we use the terms interchangeably on this page."

The "after" version established the meaning of the word and teaches human and machine readers that these terms refer to the same thing.

Write short paragraphs

Dense paragraphs are hard to parse. AI-powered search pulls small chunks of a page as the source for a response, and short paragraphs make chunking cleaner. Think about how people read: a long sentence that takes up half a page is more difficult to understand or cite than a paragraph broken into shorter sentences.

Solution: Aim for paragraphs of two to four sentences. If a paragraph is longer, look for a natural place to split it.

Write direct sentences

Nested clauses, hedging language, and passive voice make sentences harder to interpret.

Example:

Before: "It should be noted that in circumstances where a customer may have, at some prior point, established a recurring payment arrangement, the process for modifying such an arrangement, which is generally handled through the billing portal, may require additional verification steps depending on the account type in question."

After: "To change a recurring payment, go to the billing portal. Some account types require additional verification before you can make changes."

The "after" version contains the same content in a fraction of the words, and AI can retrieve a clean, useful chunk from it.