Companies have started listing AIO/GEO/AEO on top of SEO in their job openings. If you’re a content writer, you might feel overwhelmed with all these new acronyms, macam lagi semak CV. But do not fear, Cikgu Khai is here! Because when it comes to writing, things stay more or less the same. A lot of good SEO and storytelling habits still carry over:
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First, write with clarity. Then, with brevity.
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Information should flow in the same direction as your writing. When users read a sentence from left to right, they should be able to construct meaning as they go along instead of having to re-read the whole thing to make sense of it. Use tools such as Hemingway App to check your readability.
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Users don’t read, they skim. When structuring your content, subheaders can serve users in two ways: 1) To quickly evaluate if your content is worth their time; and 2) As signposts for them to navigate the article (esp considering they may switch tabs back and forth). (Ok this one is more of a personal preference: check for the continuity of your subheaders - are they building up after each other, are they standardized?)
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In technical writing, you want to help users zoom into what they’re looking for ASAP so they can ciao and resume life.
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In narrative writing, you want to keep users engaged as long as possible until they perform an action you desire, whatever that may be (eg subscribe to a newsletter, sign a petition). On that note, I don’t like having any elements break that continuity, such as pop-ups or mid-article lead capture.
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Reduce clutter, avoid cliches, skip the “happy talk”. The more your content sounds like any other, the more likely it would get lost in the weeds.
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Technical stuff behind all the points above: The robots prioritise usefulness and economy. Eg long reading time and low bounce rate can signal usefulness, while succinct copy means less work to distil when collating from multiple sources.
There’s one big difference, though. On search engines, we type keywords. With chatbots, we tend to, well, chat. This can have some implications:
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The death of keyword stuffing. The rise of… conversational content? I don’t mean that we should sound sychopantic and spam “You’re right!” on every intro. Rather, it’s yet another incentive to write with a specific audience in mind. This is an age-old piece of advice from William Zinsser himself, which we tend to forget when speaking to what feels like a faceless public.
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The way you prefer your answers to appear in chatbots can be a starting guide for what you will write. Eg bullet list, comparison table.
To re-iterate my point about unique human content, I have a theory: as much as gen-AI produces slop by default (regression towards the mean), they still crave novelty (arguably before cannibalising it into the training data lol). Because OUR BRAINS crave novelty. This has been proven recently when companies started to look for human storytellers again — the market corrected itself.
Ok itu je, selamat berbuka jangan berduka.
Originally posted on:
25 Feb 2026