Ai and Your Website

Here we go again... another article about AI. I'm going to talk about this in my own voice. Not edited by whatever the new AI company thinks will get me the most engagement.

When it comes to building a website for your business, organization, or yourself, think about what you're really trying to accomplish. Are you simply selling a product? Are you trying to gain membership? Or do you simply want to share something you're passionate about?

Chances are, your site visitor doesn't give two licks about AI on your site. And neither should you. That clever chatbot you pay a hefty sum every month for? It's annoying. The customer journey that forces your potential customer to cut bait and go to your competitor? No one cares about it.

Here's what you'll need to know about. AI providers scrape the internet for information. Just like search engine placement was king, now it's relevance as it's seen from the AI platform. Meta tags, descriptions, keywords, blah blah blah. Most of that is actually irrelevant in the world we are getting hurled into right now.

You need real, relevant, and quality data. Period. If you try to trick the platforms into thinking you have the best content or should be referenced whenever anyone searches for 'anything', I have news for you. They're on to you. AI doesn't care about you. These platforms look at how often you update content, what the quality of the content is, and have you simply hijacked from another site or worst yet, asked AI to write your content. The AI information loop is real, and it gets messy. So stop being clever, Focus on quality content and find the support you need to make sure that content appears the way it needs to on the web,

There are some technical things you can add to your site to help with AI-EO (AI Engine Optimization) but that can be a topic for another day. Structured data or AI-friendly programming of a website still doesn't matter one single bit unless you have the content to back it up.

Are you seeing a pattern here?

This reminds me of the kids trying to 'go viral' on social media with their ridiculous videos. Sure, they may hit the algorithm jackpot but I always tell them it's best to become good at something THEN share it, rather than try to gain an audience before you've put in the work.

So here are a few of my personal guidelines when it comes to Ai-friendly content and websites.

• Quality over quantity - Two pages of real digestable information is better than a thousand pages of junk.
• Keep it stupid - Unless someone is referencing your site for a college course or needing real technical information, don't try and outsmart your audience.
• Don't use AI - I didn't use AI to write this. How many people will read this? Maybe one if I'm lucky. In the off chance more people find it, I want to be as genuine as I can with what my presence is on the internet.

At the end of the day, unless you are managing hundreds of thousands or more site visitors or have a multi-million dollar marketing budget, you should capitalize on what people care about. And that's YOU. Whatever it is you are selling, sharing, ranting about, or otherwise having an influence on other people, needs to keep the human connection in mind. (But please use spell check if you can)