The art of writing blog articles that both humans and LLMs want to read

More and more people are meeting your content second hand, through an AI summary rather than your website. That does not mean writing for machines. It means writing so clearly that a machine cannot misquote you, and so usefully that a human keeps reading.

Answer the question in the first 60 words

Put the answer at the top, then earn the rest of the article by explaining it. Language models lift the clearest, most self contained statement they can find. If your answer is buried in paragraph nine behind a story about your childhood, it will not get quoted, and most readers will have left anyway.

Structure is meaning

• One H1, then descriptive H2s that read like questions a person would actually ask.
• Short sections. If a section runs past 200 words, it probably contains two ideas.
• Use tables and lists for anything comparable. They are easier to scan and easier to extract.
• Make every paragraph able to stand alone. Avoid 'as mentioned above' and 'this is why', which lose their meaning when lifted out of context.

Be specific enough to be citable

Vague writing is unquotable writing. 'Businesses should keep good records' is filler. 'Keep digital VAT records for six years, and file within one calendar month and seven days of your quarter end' is a fact worth surfacing. Specifics also signal expertise to a reader deciding whether to trust you.

Say who you are and how you know

Named authors, real job titles, dates on the page, and a line about how you know what you know. Both readers and ranking systems weigh first hand experience. If you have worked with 40 firms in this position, say so.

Technical basics that still matter

• A title under 60 characters with the phrase people actually search.
• A meta description under 160 characters that promises the answer.
• Article schema with author, published date and updated date.
• Descriptive alt text, internal links to related pieces, and a clean canonical URL.
• A visible last updated date. Freshness is one of the cheapest ranking wins available.

Write the piece so a busy human gets what they need in 40 seconds, and a curious one gets the full picture in six minutes. Serve both and the machines take care of themselves.

The final pass

Read it aloud. Cut every sentence that only exists to sound clever. Replace every adjective with a number where you can. Then ask the honest question: if a competitor published this, would you be annoyed? If not, it is not finished.