Rather than searching for answers on Google, individuals are instead looking for answers on sites like ChatGPT and, before clicking on a link, on an AI Overview that has already addressed the query. As a result, the way users discover sites like blogs has already changed.

None of these requires a blogger to start writing for a computer (as if they missed something). Nowadays, WordPress optimization includes reducing a few basic barriers to important information about a blogger’s work, allowing a natural voice to be discovered by as many relevant people as feasible.

What Actually Changes When AI Reads Your Blog Instead of a Search Bot

There is no indexing or ranking like in the good old days of Google Search. The data is read as a text file and then sorted by relevancy. Search engines look for direct responses, identified parts, and simple English material.

If, for example, a blog post is well-written but concealed by an excessive amount of ornamental elements inside the text (so-called heavy themes or page builders with several layout blocks), the material is worse for AI-powered search engines than bad content displayed plainly. The answer for bloggers and site operators is straightforward: if the finest information is clearly provided on a WordPress site, the site will likewise perform well in search engines.

The same content written by a blogger could be rendered inaccessible by a heavy theme or page builder (and a multitude of WordPress plugins) that embeds content within underlying code.

Of course, that written content will still look perfectly normal to the human visitor of a WordPress blog. Yet the underlying code is something that an AI search tool will find hard to read, and therefore hard to ‘get’. This is true at any scale, and it’s part of why even larger publishers evaluating the best AI-ready CMS for their own platforms are ultimately solving the same underlying problem a WordPress blogger is: structure that a machine can actually read cleanly.

Again, this is not to say that a blogger needs to ‘write for a search engine’ and find a way to express himself or herself in ‘optimized’ language.

In the long run, the material currently on a WordPress site is likely sufficient for AI search, assuming it has not been disguised by excessive eye candy or too complicated page design. The sole criterion is that it be legible by current tools and broad search tools.

Practical Steps to Prep Your Site

Revisit your old blog posts – without having to write a whole load of new material – and do a handful of simple fixes to a WordPress site.

• It is far better to utilize clear and descriptive headings on your WordPress website and use a section titled What This Actually Costs and list out the costs for your readers, versus burying them in a section of your blog titled The Breakdown.

• Provide a direct-answer or FAQ section at the top of key articles. This will contain the answers to the sorts of questions that people searching for information on a particular topic would like to find.

• For additional flexibility in WordPress content rendering, be sure to check whether your content is being rendered by server-side scripts (i.e., the typical approach for most themes) or by client-side JavaScript. As mentioned, very complex and customized page builders sometimes render content in JavaScript only on the client-side, outside of server-side scripts, which some AI crawling tools might not read at all.

• This means avoiding the excessive use of page builders to create ‘layers’ within a WordPress post or blog article. While a single block within a WordPress post may seem to provide plenty of structure, adding excessive layers can lead to a large amount of additional markup that surrounds each simple paragraph of written content.

• Add schema markup. For WordPress sites, this can now be set up by site owners without developers involved. For example, RankMath (free tier) has a simple-to-use visual schema builder that allows site owners to add a wide variety of schema types, including 17 different types of schema for articles and blogs. For users of Yoast SEO for WordPress, the plugin automatically adds breadcrumb schema markup for site owners, as part of the normal functionality of the plugin.

These small changes to your blog’s structure are far more important than sitting down to write a whole load of new content.

Keeping Your Voice Intact

None of this will translate into writing a different style of article or reporting, in order to optimize for the search for information, or for finding the information within the article for AI.

The structural changes necessary for the information in the articles to reach those searching for information will still allow for the best writing, the best reporting, and the best blogging, as the articles are now being written.

Your goal should not be to change the way you write for the sake of search engines. Rather, your goal should be to make sure your voice is able to be read by search engines as well as by people searching for information on the Web.