Two audiences now read every page you publish. One is a person with a screen and a few seconds of patience. The other is a language model deciding whether your page is worth citing in an answer. The good news is that they reward the same discipline. The bad news is that most brand sites fail both.
Say the thing in the first sentence
Humans skim; models summarise. Both start at the top. Lead every page and every section with the claim, not the wind-up. If a section is about pricing, the first line should contain a price. If it is about a method, the first line should name the method. Cleverness can come second.
Structure is content
Headings, lists and short paragraphs are not decoration. They are how a model finds the boundaries of an idea and how a reader decides where to look. Use one H1, real H2s in the order a reader would ask questions, and keep each block about one thing. A page that is one long paragraph is invisible to both audiences.
Be specific enough to quote
Answer engines cite sentences that stand on their own: a number, a definition, a named process. "We deliver fast" cannot be quoted. "A campaign film and its site ship within three weeks of the brief" can. Write for the sentence that will be lifted out of context, because it will be.
If a sentence would be useless as a pull quote, it is probably useless on the page.
Give machines the map
A meta title and description on every page. Descriptive alt text on every image, describe what is shown, not what it is for. A sitemap. A plain-text llms.txt at the root that tells models what the site is and where the important pages are. None of this is visible to a human visitor, and all of it decides whether you appear in the answer.
Do not split the audiences
The temptation is to write a beautiful page for people and a keyword page for machines. Resist it. Duplicate, thin pages get discounted, and readers can tell when a text was written for a crawler. One page, written plainly, structured honestly, with the facts up front, is the whole method.
A short checklist
- One idea per page, stated in the first sentence.
- Headings in the order a reader would ask.
- At least one concrete, quotable fact per section.
- Meta title under 60 characters; description under 160.
- Alt text that describes the image.
- llms.txt and sitemap.xml at the root.