Write for the humans. The robots will follow them right to you.
That's the whole article. If you stop reading here, you've got the part that matters. But the reasoning -- the part that follows -- is why it's true, and why almost everyone is about to optimize in the wrong direction.
The Numbers Are Real, But Read Them Carefully
In 2025, automated traffic (yes, bot traffic, AI crawl,… you name it) crossed a line it had never crossed before. In 2025, bots accounted for 51% of all web traffic; this is the first time in… ever (in my opinion) that machines outnumbered people online. In fact, Cloudflare, which handles traffic for roughly a fifth of the web, expects bots to fully overtake humans by 2027.
In those 51% of bots’ web traffic, most is scrapers and bots you'll never write for. But underneath it sits the part that does change your job: a fast-growing stream of AI reading your work on a human's behalf, then deciding whether to quote you.
The Trap You Shouldn’t Fall For
The instinct, once you accept that machines are reading, is to write for them, right? Pack in the schema, format for the summarizer, chase the crawler.
Well… no. The data says don't. A Search Engine Journal analysis of 68 million AI crawler visits found that AI didn't elevate obscure, gamed pages. It kept returning to the sites that already had human readers, and crawling them roughly three times as often. So the message is clear: machines follow attention -- human attention, they don't create it. Optimize for the crawler alone, and you're chasing the thing that's chasing your readers.
Why Writing for Humans Wins the Machines Anyway
A chatbot doesn't read your article the way a person does, start to finish. It pulls out passages. The retrieval systems behind ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI answers break a page into chunks and grab the specific bit that answers the prompted question, which is why a 2,000-word wall of text does badly -- there's nothing clean to lift. The same analyses show these systems favor pages that
Now think about how you read on your phone; most of the time, you're also scanning for the one line worth your time. Same behavior -- both the machine and the human actively look for the part that says the thing they need to see. If your point is buried six paragraphs down behind a warm-up, neither the human nor the machine ever reaches it.
So there's real overlap, and it's worth being precise about where: clarity and specificity win both. A sharp, well-supported point, easy to find, gets quoted by the model and remembered by the reader. But they're not identical. The machine wants the clean, liftable fact. The human wants the part the machine can't give them, which is the opinion, the angle, the line, only you would write. Write for the machine and you get found. Write for the human and you get read.
What to Actually Do
Lead with the claim: Say it upfront. Both audiences decide in two sentences. (This piece opened with its conclusion; take that as a quick demo)
Be specific enough that no one else could've written the sentence: “AI is changing content" is invisible to a human and useless to a machine. "Bots hit 51% of web traffic in 2025" is something both carry away.
Keep the edges on: The contrarian read, the lived detail, the take you're nervous to publish -- that's what a human remembers and what a model has no training-data copy of. Being generic is the one thing infinite machines already make for free.
In Conclusion…
We spent a whole article on robots to land somewhere almost funny: on a web that gets more automated by the day, your highest-leverage move is to write like one specific, opinionated human being.
The machines aren't the audience; use them to pave your way to reach humanity.
Want to Get Better at the Hard Part?
Writing clearly enough to win both the reader and the algorithm is a skill, and it's the one this whole piece is really about. If you want to sharpen it,
SEO + Storytelling: Write Content That Ranks and Resonates How to Write Great Articles That People Will Read How to Find Your “Voice” and Ideal Writing Workflow
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That’s it for today.
Until next time, Hackers!