Writing for robots – How to optimise your writing for LLMs
Who do you think reads most of your technical writing? Customers? Potential customers?
If your work is public and not behind a log-in, I hate to disappoint you, but your most frequent reader probably isn’t human. And this is nothing new.
Since website crawlers began venturing out onto the internet to compile websites for people to find the information they need, services running on machines have been reading our work, casting a silent lack of judgment.
And now comes a new wave of machines guzzling our content to feed and train large language models (LLMs).
Whatever you think of the old and new wave of machines consuming our content, unless you disallow them, it’s hard to stop them. However, the good news is that writing and maintaining good content for humans also produces good content for robots! Yay?
In this post, based on a recent presentation I will record a video of soon, I recap some good writing advice. Much of which you hopefully already know, but it’s always worth revisiting and looking at why it helps machines, too.
Before I begin, a disclaimer.
I wrote this post mostly for people who write technical documentation and blog posts. However, much of the advice is useful for anyone…
