This week on Local Search Tuesdays, I’m diving into a major shift you need to make with your website content — and it’s something that’s even more critical in the age of AI search: content chunking.
For years, people got caught up in chasing word counts for SEO, turning helpful info into unreadable word walls. But now, with AI breaking queries into sub-queries and analyzing specific content sections, the game has changed.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Welcome back to another episode of Local Search Tuesdays. This week, I’m talking about an important shift that you need to make with your website content. It’s a shift you should have made years ago, but with the rise of AI search, it’s absolutely vital… I’m talking about content chunking.
Content has always been the cornerstone of SEO and digital marketing. Sure, there are other signals that influence your visibility, but at the root, nothing matters without content for people to read.
Somewhere along the way, people started worrying more about SEO than they did about actually helping customers. You’d start to hear people quoting research that said “the average number one ranking page was 1,532 words” and then people assumed more was better.
Content ballooned into massive word walls that were painful to actually read.
Things got worse and worse. Over time, it got so bad that some people would claim that you needed over 2,000 words to rank. Then it became 2,500. But it was always about total length for the sole purpose of ranking.
People basically forgot who they were writing for. Do you think any potential customer would buy from a site simply because it had 2,500 words about a topic when others only had 1,500?
Obviously, I’m over-simplifying things. There are definitely more complex niche cases where 2,500 words would be necessary. But in most cases, if you can thoroughly answer a customer’s question, that’s how long your post should be.
If you can answer the question in 857 words, but you thought you needed 2,000 to compete, you’d add 1,143 words of fluff. Now more than half of your content is useless fluff, and it wouldn’t be the great answer it would be at 857 words.
More importantly, people forgot about readability. Massive paragraph after massive paragraph makes content harder to read. Savvy digital marketers have been talking about chunking content for a while now. No, that’s not the kinda Chunk I was talking about… If you break that massive wall of text down into shorter readable chunks, it creates a much better user experience. It also helped with Google.
But now we have AI search systems, and they work completely differently. I’ve talked about query fan-out in past episodes, and it’s a big part of the reason that chunkable content is so important moving forward.
The AI model will break your initial query into multiple sub-queries and then build its answer based on the relevant sections of content it found in the multiple sub-queries.
In other words, the AI systems evaluate individual sections within a single piece of content.
Traditional SEO still matters, but you need to start ALSO optimizing for AI search results. That means you need to be sure that your content is chunked. You need short, easily digestible sections of content within the page. We need to shift from trying to create a single long page that ranks to multiple chunks on a page about a single topic, and any of those chunks could potentially rank in AI search results.
A single piece of content has always included multiple “micro-answers”, but typically the piece of content was a massive wall of text. Breaking that massive wall of text into smaller chunks makes it easier for humans to read and also easier for AI systems to digest the content. That means you’re more likely to provide the snippet that best answers one aspect of the question that the AI model is trying to answer.
We’re not optimizing an entire page to hopefully rank for a single query anymore. We’re optimizing a page to hopefully be included in multiple possible related sub-queries.
That’s all the time we have left for this week’s episode, so you know what that means. Put your hand on the screen right here: We totally just high-fived ‘cause you learned something awesome. Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you again next week for another episode of Local Search Tuesdays.
