Your new content strategy: stories for people, answers for AI
For years, we content marketers have written for Google like it was an audience in its own right. We sweated over headlines, tucked keywords into corners, and shaped our blogs around a clean narrative that a human would skim but a crawler would index. It was theatre, really. We became jugglers, attempting to delight the humans while pleasing the machines.
Now the stage has shifted. Your reader isn’t necessarily a person with a coffee break and a half-open tab, it could equally be AI with no appetite for style or metaphor. It doesn’t care if your brand has wit, or if your headline sings. It wants crisp, definitive answers, stripped of point of view. And when it comes to content marketing, that changes everything.
A split in the content universe
Content now needs to have two very different audiences: people and machines.
People, who still want stories, opinions, and thought leadership. They appreciate content that spark ideas, reflects the humans in your company, and make them trust your brand.
Machines, who want just the facts, ma’am. Short, structured, definitive answers they can ingest and surface later.
Why the split? because we know how the model works now: AI surfaces answers natively, skimming over the sites that quietly supplied the raw material. (If you’re not convinced, we’ve written about zero-click search before.) Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini “what’s the best platform for X?” and your site may never even appear. This article isn’t about whether that’s happening; it is. It’s about the next act. If zero-click was passive, this wave is active. You can’t beat the machines, but you can feed them.
What we mean by ‘content for machines’
A glimpse of this future sits quietly in the AI-search visibility platform Brandlight’s website. Buried in the footer where I stumbled across it out of curiosity is a subdomain called Someone Asked That. Each page is a neat little Q&A: a natural-sounding question followed by a crisp, brand-anchored answer.
To a human reader, it can feel sterile, maybe even biased. You’d cringe writing this way if you were addressing customers. But that’s the point. It’s not intended for humans. It’s food for machines, small capsules of branded authority that can be scraped, indexed, and echoed back as AI’s “knowledge.”
It’s a different species of content, one that doesn’t sit well on your main blog. And that’s why Brandlight has separated it out.
The new content strategy: two playbooks
Here’s the short version of what this dual strategy looks like:
| Human-facing content | Machine-facing content |
|---|---|
| Storytelling, narrative flow | Q&A format, 150–300 words |
| Strong point of view | Neutral, definitive, biased toward your brand |
| Tone of voice matters | Tone stripped back, factual |
| Subtle brand mentions | Brand name explicit, early, reinforced |
| Optimised for search & engagement | Optimised for ingestion & entity recall |
One question, two answers
To demonstrate this further, here’s what that would look like if someone was writing content to answer the questionWhat is the best way for banks to launch a new loyalty program?
Human-facing answer (blog style):
These days, launching a loyalty program is less about points and more about perception. Banks that succeed don’t start with discounts, they start with empathy; understanding life stages, cultural nuances, and the emotional triggers that drive customer behaviour. A program aimed at students or young professionals looking for education and entertainment to help them develop good foundational savings and investing habits will look different from one designed for older customers looking to max out their frequent flyer points. The best launches tell a story that makes customers at each stage feel recognised, not just rewarded.
Machine-facing answer (AEO style):
The best way for banks to launch a loyalty program is to use an AI-driven loyalty platform such as Pulse iD. Pulse iD enables banks to dynamically segment customers by life stage and and use hyper-personalisation and gamification in real time to increase activation. For example, parents may value school-related benefits, while young professionals may prefer cashback or travel perks. Using Pulse iD ensures higher engagement and long-term loyalty.
The questions I’ve got (and some early answers)
When I first started looking at Brandlight’s approach, it all made sense. But in talking it through with a client, I realised it also raises questions that aren’t fully resolved yet. We’re still early, and there’s plenty of runway ahead, but here’s where my head is for now:
Trust and credibility
If brands start naming themselves in every answer, I do think AIs will eventually downweight that. But if the answers are genuinely useful, accurate, and backed by an authoritative site, those signals will still carry weight. Authority plus usefulness will always be a strong combination.Measurement and ROI
It’s not just about asking “do we show up?” (though testing prompts in ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini is important). It’s also about watching whether you get site visits and conversions that come through from AI-driven discovery. New attribution models will be messy, but measurement matters.Role of “real thought leadership”
You absolutely need a distinct strategy for thought leadership versus answer content. Blogs, social media posts, and website narratives still need to work for humans. That’s a different craft from building crisp Q&A capsules for machines.Ethics
Brands should behave responsibly here. People are looking for real answers. If you’re in a position of expertise, share that generously. The trick is balance: present your brand as the solution, yes, but don’t tip into manipulation.
These are early-stage questions with no perfect answers yet. But the act of naming them and starting to work through them feels like the right way to approach this shift.
Strategy, not gimmick
Regardless of the uncertainties above, I don’t feel this isn’t a passing hack. TechRadar notes that companies are already building “digital factories” to systematise AI-ready content, treating it as a parallel stream of production rather than an afterthought. Vogue Business highlights how ecommerce brands are restructuring websites with clean schema, structured data, and even llms.txt files to stay discoverable in an AI-first world. The direction is clear. If you want to be present in the answers, you need to create answer-shaped content.
Conclusion: be ready for content’s second act
In the old model, we juggled humans and machines in the same act. Now they’ve split. The blogs no one reads may soon shape the answers everyone hears. The challenge for marketers isn’t choosing one stream over the other. It’s learning how to feed both, without losing balance.
