GEO Hurts My Eyes
Is anyone else wondering why it's written in natural language?
It feels like every time I try to use the internet to read something, and don't go directly to a source I have already identified as useful or informative, I get domed by a wall of text. The experience is similar to trying to read markdown for 5,000 words. I'd prefer not to just read AI overviews. I appreciate them, but I like to visit the links they suggest.
This isn't so different from SEO, which is used to win over search engines, but it's getting worse. It goes beyond product blogs. My AI overviews recommend human interest pieces that can't possibly be written for humans. They're shudderingly verbose and comprehensive, containing little-to-no formatting (beyond a couple sub-headlines) that would help break things up for a human eye. They're not blatantly keyword-stuffed like an SEO article, but contain way too much context. The tone is Everyperson. If something is written by AI, to virtual signal to AI, so that it can make recommendations to me, why bother writing it in English? At least if it was written in beeps and boops, I wouldn't mistake it as something meant to communicate with me directly.
I'm mostly joking; I know LLMs are trained on natural language. I'd settle for a label. There are probably more, but the only piece I've seen that says it's written expressly for an LLM is Claude's Constitution. It says:
The document is written with Claude as its primary audience, so it might read differently than you’d expect. For example, it’s optimized for precision over accessibility, and it covers various topics that may be of less interest to human readers.
Of less interest to human readers is one way to put it. I genuinely appreciate the acknowledgement.
We're in a weird place. Websites started as interfaces for humans to execute tasks on the internet. Now, LLMs do some of the tasks we used to do, while also helping us decide where to do the tasks we've kept. I guess we have to share the space, but if this is all in service of humanity, I'd love to get to the part I've naively imagined where my head doesn't hurt.
To end this on a less peevish note, here are a couple shops that are cranking out good writing for people to read:
- Flaming Hydra
- Ex Research - this specific article is a great read on AI-generated content