WHY GOOD WRITING MATTERS IN THE AGE OF AI
WHY GOOD WRITING MATTERS IN THE AGE OF AI
“Well that’s another load of ai slop!”
This was a despairing cry heard loud and often in 2025 among people who cared about good copy.
Marketing professionals whose jobs touched on content creation initially marvelled at the insane speed large language models, or LLMs, could pump out words.
They quickly despaired as ChatGPT, the most popular of the LLMs, spewed out generic business-speak, pseudo-profound truisms and plain hallucinatory nonsense – all sprinkled with the ultimate AI giveaway, the em dash.
But could the inexorable rise of AI – and more specifically Generative Engine Optimisation, or GEO – actually save the art of good writing?
GEO is the process of making content easily understood for the big LLMs such as Perplexity, Gemini and ChatGPT.
It’s also the most significant disruption to Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO, since the latter emerged as a sales and marketing channel with the rise of Google in the late 1990s.
SEO as a discipline could be painful for those who cared about good writing.
No half-decent writer - author, journalist or business scribe - was ever going to be dictated to by a spreadsheet of keywords.
They knew that persuasive, emotive, powerful writing did not emerge at the behest of an algorithm.
There was a painful conflict between digital and creative. Yes, we need our client to be on page one of Google. But surely not with this execrable copy littered with corporate keywords?
Enter stage left, cape billowing, GEO.
At the end of 2023, search started to change as AI became a force – and in the last year it made serious inroads into SEO’s dominance.
It’s important to note that SEO does still play a part in GEO – LLMs still need to be able to crawl over websites efficiently – but the worst of its spammy backlink behaviours have been diluted in favour of contextual information.
No longer are internet users running their eye down a list of links to websites. Instead they are reading a detailed AI-generated contextual answer at the top of their Google search, or going straight onto their chosen AI app to search for information.
And the quality that is valued above all else to generate that answer is clarity. Simple explanations on subjects, clear descriptions of brands, all logically set out and written with precision and brevity.
Clarity, the most important quality for great writing, is on the cusp of a renaissance.
Almost as important as the clarity of the writing is the quality of the citation – AI places a premium on trust.
GEO will look at your website and your social media but research has shown it will place more importance on earned media – the third-party validation of the trusted journalist.
A number of different pieces of research have found that media coverage was cited by ChatGPT more than 60% of the time (with some estimates much higher) when answering questions about big brands.
If your business has been hailed as the best in its industry in a respected publication, AI should recognise that as more valuable than multiple mentions in low quality sites.
To get into those publications in the first place, your startup or scaleup needs eye-catching pitches and well-written press releases and opinion pieces.
All of this is good news for communications agencies populated by able writers with media connections. And it’s good news for you if you’re working with a good communications agency.
