Don’t get ghosted by Google

Want to be a ghost? Prompt and post. You’ll be invisible.

That’s the message of Google’s new guide to optimizing content for AI search, published last week.

If you want your content to be seen, you can’t simply prompt Claude or ChatGPT and post the raw output straight to the web. Do this and Google will label it “commodity content” and ignore it.

And what exactly is commodity content? It’s writing based on common knowledge. No personality, no viewpoint, sounds good but it’s bland as sand. It’s what AI churns out by the terabyte every day.

Non-commodity content--that’s what you want to be posting. It might start with AI but it doesn’t end there. It’s content that’s uniquely yours, writing informed by firsthand experience, original insights and a human point of view.

This is the content AI search engines filter for now. They want a human in the loop. And if you don’t have one, you’re pretty much invisible.