Stop Writing for Algorithms — Start Feeding Them

For years, marketers have been told to “write for humans, not algorithms.”
It sounded noble. It made us feel like we were standing up to the machines.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth: if you’re not writing for algorithms today, you’re invisible to humans tomorrow.

Because the machines are the interface now.

ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity — these aren’t just tools people use to search. They’re how people discover, evaluate, and decide. They summarize the internet for you, and in that process, they decide who gets seen and who doesn’t.

The old rulebook of SEO was about optimizing pages for crawlers.
The new rulebook of AI discovery is about feeding models with proof.

The Era of “Answer Engines” Changed Everything

Answer engines don’t crawl your meta tags. They don’t index your XML sitemap.
They learn — from patterns, repetition, and credibility across sources.

So when someone asks, “What’s the best cybersecurity software for startups?” the model doesn’t scrape your homepage.
It retrieves what it remembers: mentions, reviews, discussions, and references that have already shaped its context of who you are.

If you’ve never been part of that context, you don’t exist in the answer.

That’s why “optimizing for AI” isn’t about clever prompts or tricking a chatbot into saying your name.
It’s about feeding the system with consistent, credible signals across the places it learns from — Reddit threads, review platforms, thought-leadership articles, earned media, and real user discussions.

Every credible mention is a new neuron firing in the model’s brain about you.

Writing for Humans Was Never the Problem

The problem is we stopped asking which humans matter most.

Models learn from humans who contribute — not the ones who consume.
From the founders sharing insight on Hacker News, the practitioners posting answers on Reddit, the reviewers describing their experience on G2.

Those people shape what AI believes to be true.

So, yes, still write for humans. But write for the humans feeding the algorithms.
They’re the new gatekeepers of discoverability.

AI Doesn’t Reward Content. It Rewards Consensus.

Traditional SEO rewarded whoever optimized best.
AI rewards whoever the world agrees with.

If five trusted sources say your product solves a real problem, and ten random blogs copy that message, the model starts treating it as fact.
That’s not “gaming” the system — it’s teaching it.

In a sense, marketing has turned into collective training.
And the smartest brands are already acting like contributors to the dataset, not contestants in the search results.

Discovery Is No Longer a Ranking Problem. It’s a Representation Problem.

Visibility in AI isn’t about where you appear. It’s about whether you appear at all.

Because if your brand isn’t being mentioned, reviewed, or discussed in the sources that LLMs learn from, the model literally has nothing to recall.
It’s not that you rank low.
You’re just not there.

That’s the quiet crisis AI discovery has exposed — most companies are shouting into web pages while the future of visibility happens off-page.

How to Feed the Machines (Without Selling Your Soul)

1. Stop chasing keywords. Start building evidence.
   Publish insights worth citing, not just clicking.
   Mentions and backlinks matter again — but now they shape model memory, not Google rankings.

2. Show up where models listen.
   Reddit, Quora, G2, niche forums, GitHub, press coverage — the data well that feeds AI is surprisingly social.

3. Make credibility cumulative.
   Each mention compounds. Every public reference makes you a little more retrievable, a little more visible, a little more “known” to the machines.

4. Think distribution beyond traffic.
   The next wave of marketing isn’t about who visits your site — it’s about who trains on it.

The Future Belongs to the Brands That Teach

The best marketers of this decade won’t just be storytellers.
They’ll be educators — not for their audience, but for the algorithms that reach them.

Because every time you publish, post, or get mentioned, you’re not just marketing.
You’re training the next generation of discovery engines to remember you.

So stop writing for algorithms.
Start feeding them.