I hear some pros talk about marketing and it’s clear they’re using confusion as a sales tactic. I’m not feeling mean enough to list examples, so let’s move on to the lesson:

If you want to shut out the noise, stick to one principle: Build for bots, create for humans.

Build infrastructure that supports discoverability across all platforms, from social media to search to AI. Create multimodal content that delivers exactly what your human audience needs at just the right time.

Build for bots

Remove barriers and make it easy for automated tools of all kinds, from search bots to LLM scrapers to agents, to find, read, and classify information about your products or services.

If you’re gonna build for bots, you must, at a minimum, do these things:

1. Use clean markup. On your site, in your emails, in your app, on Reddit, or anywhere else. Don’t use 30 nested DIVs. Use platform-compliant markup. For gods’s sake, don’t cut-and-paste AI-generated junk.
2. Write clean code. 5 megabyte javascript files make me die inside. 5,000-line CSS files hurt my soul. There is no way you need all that crap on every page. For AI-generated code, see #1.
3. Build for speed. 1 and 2, sure, but also look at server infrastructure, image compression,
4. Provide API endpoints. If you know what this is, you know. If you don’t, hire someone who does. Endpoints give agents and other gadgets access your data. Endpoints can also bollix up your entire business, though, so listen to the experts.
5. Plan for hygiene. Build with URL permanence in mind. Have the
6. Provide structured data. Use schema and think beyond rich snippets markup. Provide a complete picture of the data you’re delivering on your page or in your response. Also, use clean markup (see #1) and write clean code (see #2) so that machines can easily parse your information. And use the right markup in that Reddit post, will ya? That’s structure.
7. Deliver metadata. Tag your HTML pages with titles, descriptions, and social media metadata. And provide the right metadata in files for images, videos, and any other content you’re delivering, anywhere.
8. Avoid abstraction. Do not use AI to build and deploy anything to a production environment. Understand what you built and the tools you used. Regardless of the tool you use, review pages and endpoints for redundant or unnecessary code or data.

As a general rule, provide complete data, keep it simple, don’t decorate, and don’t layer one tool on top of another.

That’ll get you started.

Create for humans

This one’s simpler. And harder. Treat your content—everything you say or do anywhere—as your most valuable product, and give it the attention it deserves.

I’ve spent my entire life trying to create for humans. I still don’t get it right. So assume this list is incomplete:

1. Teach the shit out of everything. Provide valuable information in everything you post or publish, anywhere online.
2. Be complete. Don’t make me click around to find vital information about your product or service.
3. Don’t get fluffy. Avoid three paragraphs of keyword-stuffed garbage. Don’t post to social channels unless it really matters. Make video content that gets right to the point.
4. Create great zero-click content. I won’t try to explain it here. Amanda Natividad nails it in this article.
5. And provide a great return on time invested, OK?
6. Oh, also: Don’t use AI to create your content. You want to use it to brainstorm/brief/outline? Go for it. But by design AI generates average everything. Your final product must be better than average.

“Ian,” folks ask, “what about agents? They’re not humans, but they want our content. Shouldn’t I create for them, too?”

Absolutely. Building for bots (see above) ensures agents have access to everything you create for humans via APIs and discoverable content.

The payoff

It’s more work than the “create-fifty-articles-and-hope-someone-finds-us” strategy, but build for bots, create for humans is a better long-term approach.

If you build for bots and create for humans, you create the kind of content that appears on all search surfaces and you give the tools driving those search surfaces easy access.

Want examples?

This whole post came pouring out of my brain during a frenzied 2AM writing binge. You want examples? Let me know, and I’ll write a few.