We spent 20 years optimizing marketing for human attention. What happens when the audience is an AI?

More of what gets "read" online now isn't read by a person at all. It's summarized by an AI Overview, cited by a chatbot, or scraped by an agent doing research on someone else's behalf. The content still exists, but the human eyeballs it was written for are increasingly optional.

That's a weirder shift than it sounds. Marketing is built almost entirely on models of human psychology: attention spans, emotional triggers, scarcity, social proof. None of that obviously applies to a language model deciding whether to cite your page. We might be optimizing skillsets that are quietly becoming irrelevant for a growing share of the funnel, without really noticing.

I don't think anyone knows what "persuading an AI" even means yet, or if that's even the right frame. Maybe it's not persuasion at all, just legibility: structure, clarity, verifiability, instead of appealing to a reader's ego or fear of missing out.

Curious if anyone here has actually felt this shift concretely rather than theoretically. Has anything about how you write or structure content changed because you're now writing for a filter, not a person?