You’re Writing for the Wrong Audience

Scott Liewehr is Global Vice President of Market Strategy & Growth at Sitecore and a CMS Critic contributor. 

I’ve spent over twenty-five years helping organizations communicate with their customers through digital channels. First as an industry analyst and now at Sitecore, I’ve watched this industry invent, reinvent, and re-reinvent concepts like content management and digital experience management so many times I’ve lost count. 

Yet, through every cycle, one thing remained true: a human created the message, and another human consumed it. The technology was just the delivery mechanism. The fundamental exchange was always human-to-human. H2H, if you will.

That’s over. 

For the marketers who have realized this, there is a quiet, existential grief. We’ve spent decades trying to forge an emotional “spark” between our brand’s soul and a human customer. Admitting that this spark must now travel through a cold, transformer-based intermediary feels like a betrayal of the craft. But ignoring it won't bring back the 'good old days' of direct traffic.

Where most marketers are right now

Right now, AI is a creation tool. Marketers are using ChatGPT, Copilot, AI agents within their platform – pick your flavor – to draft blog posts, generate ad copy, and produce email variations at scale. The industry is spending a lot of energy debating whether this is going to kill copywriters (it isn’t), whether AI-generated content is “authentic” (depends on who’s using it), and whether we should ban the em dash forever (I refuse!). But while we’re having those debates, something more fundamental is shifting underneath us.

What’s happening is simple: AI has inserted itself between the marketer and the audience. The marketer is still a human. The audience is still a human. But the creation process now has a machine in the middle. Call it H2A2H: Human to AI to Human. The AI helps you write more, faster, better. But the brief hasn’t changed. You’re still writing for a person. The buyer is still the target reader. The website visitor is still the audience. The AI is a productivity tool, and the humans on either end of the equation are the ones that matter.

This is the state of the art right now. And here’s the thing: most marketing organizations think this is cutting-edge.

They’re already behind.

The shift that needs to happen next

Here’s what needs to change, and what I think most people in our industry haven’t fully internalized yet: the audience has shifted. It’s not just that AI is helping us create content. It’s that AI has become the primary consumer of that content. An LLM crawls your blog post. An answer engine indexes your press release. An agentic search system ingests your product page and synthesizes it alongside your competitors’ claims. And then – and this is the critical part – that AI delivers its own version of your message to the human at the end of the chain.

The full sequence is now H2A→A2H: Human to AI to AI to Human. The first A helps you create. The second A decides whether and how your brand shows up when a customer asks a question. That second A is the new gatekeeper. And here’s what makes it especially interesting: that second AI has something you’ve never had. It has real-time context about exactly what the person on the other end is looking for.

Most marketers haven’t noticed the ground shifting. Even the AEO/GEO crowd – the Answer Engine Optimization and Generative Engine Optimization folks – are trapped in H2A2H thinking. They’re adding FAQ blocks and schema markup to every page, treating machine-readability as an afterthought to human-centric design. Their goal is to make human content “parseable” by LLMs. 

That’s a search engine mindset in a synthesizer world. 

These marketers are still trying to rank first in a list. But in an H2A→A2H reality, the list doesn’t exist. There is only one single, synthesized answer. And if your brand isn't part of that synthesis, you don't just rank low, you don't exist.

The Brief Changes

If all of this is true – and I believe it is – then the creative brief has to change. Consider the evolution:

• H2H: “Write something compelling for our target buyer to read.”
• H2A2H: “Use AI to write something compelling for our target buyer to read. Oh, and add some structured data so LLMs can parse it too.”
• H2A→A2H: “Use AI to create content that an LLM will select as the authoritative source and deliver to a buyer in exactly the context they need – because the LLM knows what they’re looking for better than we do.”

Read those three briefs again. The first two are variations of the same job: write for a human. The third is a genuinely different job. You’re no longer crafting a message for someone to consume directly. You’re crafting raw material for an AI to carry faithfully to a person. That distinction – crafting for direct consumption versus crafting for faithful carriage – is, I think, the strategic pivot of the next decade in content marketing. And almost nobody is talking about it.

Why the second ‘A’ is a better personalizer than you are

Here’s the part of this argument that marketers will find most uncomfortable: the LLM on the other end of this chain is better at serving your customer than you are.

When you write a blog post or a product page, you’re writing for a segment – “a senior decision-maker at a mid-to-large enterprise.” You’re crafting a message for thousands of people who happen to share a few demographic traits. That isn’t personalization; it’s just better than average guessing, and we’ve been pretending it’s enough for two decades. 

The LLM doesn’t guess. It knows the exact question being asked. It knows the conversational context, the specific level of detail required, and increasingly, the user’s entire preferences and history. It takes your content and delivers precisely the answer that person needs, in the tone they want, contextualized against everything else they’ve researched. 

The second A has you beat on last-mile delivery, and the gap is widening.

So, the logical question is: if the AI is going to handle the final delivery anyway, and it’s going to do a better job of contextualizing and personalizing than you can, then what exactly should you be optimizing for? The answer is: give the second A the best possible raw material. 

When I say, 'raw material,' I’m not talking about a prettier PDF or a blog post with better keywords. I’m talking about high-density brand truths. If you sell enterprise software, your 'raw material' is no longer a flowery case study; it is a structured, verifiable data set of your specific capabilities, compliance standards, and pricing logic that an agentic system can ingest without hallucinating. You are building an authoritative 'knowledge graph' for the machine to carry, not a brochure for a human to skim.

The expectation ratchet

This shift isn’t going to reverse itself. In fact, I think the pace is going to catch most of the industry off guard.

Every time an LLM provides a genuinely contextual, synthesized answer to a specific question, it raises the bar for what a human expects from information. Once you’ve asked a nuanced question and received a tailored, multi-source answer in 12 seconds – whether it’s about running shoes for flat feet or enterprise platforms that handle regulated content – browsing a website feels like thumbing through a phone book. And you don’t go back. You just don’t.

I’ve been ringing the alarm about the obsolescence of various web paradigms since the WCM era (I even wrote for Inside CXM back in 2013 about how Netflix was missing the mark on context). But this is different. This isn’t about making the website; it’s about the website becoming a secondary delivery channel entirely. AI-referred web sessions surged 527% year-over-year in the first half of 2025. 

That isn’t just a trend line. It’s the foot of a curve. The website won’t die, but its primary purpose fundamentally shifts from a “destination for humans” to “content engine that feeds the AI layer.”

The invisible editor

This is the part that keeps me up at night: the second A in H2A→A2H is, functionally, an editor. When a customer asks an LLM about your category, the model assembles an answer by making editorial decisions: which sources to cite, which claims to foreground, which brands to ignore. It’s curating and compressing your brand’s message in real time, at scale, millions of times a day, all with zero human oversight.

You can’t pitch this editor. You can’t take it to lunch. You can’t send it an embargo or a press release with a personalized note. Trust me, I’ve spent enough time on both sides of the analyst and media relationship to know the value of those things, and they are useless here. The only way to influence the AI editor is by the quality of the raw material you feed it. 

Substance. Structure. Authority. Specificity. That’s it.

Here’s the paradox: this shift should make brands more distinctive, not less. While everyone fears AI will homogenize communication, the opposite is happening. The AI editor is a clarity machine; it rewards the signal and incinerates the noise. Generic messaging gets compressed into noise. Bold, specific, and well-structured positions get cited. It rewards the brands that actually have something to say and punishes those running on platitudes. 

We’ve spent years hiding behind “marketing speak” that says nothing. Now, there’s a machine that can tell the difference. And it’s making editorial decisions about your brand accordingly.

It’s not replacement. The reader changed.

The marketer’s job hasn’t disappeared; the audience has simply evolved. Human judgment, brand instinct, strategic positioning, and point of view are more critical now than ever, because they are the only qualities that survive the compression of the second A. Everything else gets flattened. The premium on human thinking – real, substantive thinking, not “thought leadership” that says nothing – has never been higher.

We are no longer crafting messages for a person to read on a screen. We are crafting substance for a machine to carry faithfully to a person. And if you get the substance right – if your ideas are clear, your data is solid, your point of view is genuinely distinctive – that machine will deliver your message with more precision and effectiveness than any website or email campaign in history.

The flow has fundamentally changed: Humans create (with AI) for AI, and AI carries it to humans. It's H2A→A2H. This isn’t a 5-year roadmap; it’s a reality unfolding in months. But the ones who embrace it won’t just have a competitive advantage. They’ll be the only ones whose brands even show up. 

The question is whether you’ll be one of them.

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