How I Use AI: Strategy Always Comes First
Every marketing person in your inbox is using AI right now. Most of them won’t say so, and even some of them are sending you output more or less as it came off the screen.
You can tell, right? Whether it’s writing, images, or a web page, you are starting to be able to pick up the “tell-tale” signs that this has been generated by AI. Your customers can tell, too.
So I thought it was time for me to be direct about it. I use AI. But where I use it will tell you more about how I work than the fact that I use it at all.
Nothing Gets Written Until the Strategy is in Place
By the time there’s a draft of anything, the hard part is over, and often, it’s months in the making.
It’s called a strategy, which is even more important now than it ever was, as AI-slop continues to infest the internet.
Before a single page or article is written, someone has to decide: does the piece need to exist at all?
- What question is a homeowner actually asking, and are they asking it the way we think they are?
- Which of your services is invisible right now, and is that a content problem or something else?
- Which of your services, pages, or posts are visible right now, and are they the services you want to be known for today — because your business has evolved.
- If we write this piece, does it cannibalize another piece we’ve already written? Would it be better to rewrite the existing page/post into something better – something that’s worthy of who you are today – not when the piece was written in 2018? Or should we take two pieces and consolidate them into one?
- Is this a piece designed to be found, or a piece designed to be read by people who already know you? Those are different pieces, and they get built differently.
That’s the work. That’s what I’m hired for.
No AI system makes those decisions because it’s not about writing. They’re judgment calls about your business, your market, and what your website is currently failing to do. They require knowing that the firm you named as your biggest competitor isn’t the one AI is actually recommending instead of you.
I am not a copywriter who’s handed a topic and asked to produce words. I am an SEO and visibility strategist. And this is the first necessary step to working with me. It’s my non-negotiable.
Where I Actually Use AI
I’ve been studying SEO and doing SEO copywriting for nearly two decades. In that time, I built a process for turning a client interview into a page/post that ranks, converts, and keeps working for years.
AI changed exactly one thing about my process: I no longer write the first draft from a blank page.
That’s it.
It saves hours, and I’m not going to pretend that’s not valuable to my business and life. But drafting was always the cheapest part of the work. The first draft was never where the value lived. It was the raw material I spent the rest of the day baking into each piece I wrote.
One thing has been added since AI arrived: the citation pass, which didn’t exist three years ago because AI search didn’t. Everything else between the draft and the publish button is the same work I’ve been doing since well before any of this showed up.
Why that matters to you: most people selling AI-assisted content built their process around AI. Mine works the other way. The strategy came first, the process came second, and AI is a faster way to start. Take the tool away, and there’s nothing of substance underneath.
What AI Cannot Know that I Bring to Content Creation
It doesn’t know the original brick of a 1980s house that you spent weeks painstakingly finding a match for, or the dental molding you recreated on a Sunday morning in your backyard because when you received the estimate from a supplier, you thought, “That price is ridiculous! I’ll build it myself.”
It doesn’t know why you talked a client out of the home addition they were asking for because what they really needed was a better flow of space, not more.
It doesn’t know what your crew found when they tore out the master bathroom shower that was only installed five years ago (by another remodeler), or the lack of insulation in the garage of a three-year-old home.
AI can’t know, because nobody wrote it down. That information lives with you, and it’s the information that I dig for when we have our interview calls. Getting those stories onto a page is an important part of my job.
**All real examples shared by my clients.
What Happens After the First Draft
AI may help me get that first draft on paper, but everything after that is old-fashioned (aka human) and offline.
Only two of them are about the writing. The other four are decisions about your site. That’s strategic architecture.
Pass 1: The SEO. The draft goes through the actual tools I use to help me create robust content. It’s more than a keyword here or there. It’s about knowing where the keywords should live within any given piece of content. It’s the geeky part of what I do, and often the least interesting part for everyone else. Non-negotiable.
Pass 2: AI citation. This is the newest one, and what everyone’s asking (and hyper-focused) about right now. I work the headline and the paragraph structure so the piece can actually be pulled by AI. It’s a new way of writing certain aspects of an article (but not the entire thing; judgment must be used) so the AI system parsing it finds a clean, quotable answer to a question a homeowner actually asked. Sometimes that means restructuring a paragraph so the answer comes first and the context follows. Sometimes it’s a headline that reads like a question instead of a slogan. It’s a real skill, and it’s the only step on this list that’s less than three years old.
Pass 3: The interview check. I go back to the recording of the conversation we had about this project and check the draft against what you actually said. Not what sounded right. What you said. If the draft claims something you didn’t tell me, it comes out. And if we didn’t discuss something, but I feel it could add to the piece, I flag that, too, so you can answer the addition question or two so we can incorporate it into the piece.
Pass 4: The memory pass. I go back through interviews we’ve done over the years and projects you’ve described to me, looking for something that could belong in this piece. Sometimes it’s a detail you mentioned in passing on a call eighteen months ago, or a story you told me two years ago about a foundation problem. No matter what that “thing” is, I am combing my memory bank to make this piece specific to your company instead of generic.
I’ve never really thought of this as a step, per se, because it’s just something I’ve always done for my clients: I listen and pay attention. The memory pass is just what happens when someone is paying attention to your whole business instead of the one page in front of them. But it’s the step no software will ever run because that information isn’t written down anywhere. It’s in my notes and in my head.
Pass 5: Interlinking opportunities. I comb your site for pieces that should connect to this one. If we’ve worked together for any length of time, I know your site by heart — often better than you do. That’s not a boast. It’s what happens when someone reads every page you’ve published.
Pass 6: Orphan pages. I pull data from Screaming Frog, one of my SEO tools, to find your orphaned pages: the ones with no internal links pointing to them. Then I look for a way to connect one of them to this piece. Every new article is a chance to bring a stranded page back into the site.
Someone hired to write just one or two pages has no reason to do all of these passes (or steps). They have no reason to look at your orphaned content, or to hunt for internal links. They certainly will not remember a conversation from 2023, or ask whether this piece should be written at all.
It’s a different job entirely to look at each piece of content holistically, and it’s the one I do, with pleasure, because I’m a self-proclaimed content nerd and analytics geek.
... and sometimes I skip most of this
Not every piece is an SEO piece.
Some content exists to be read by the people already on your list — the ones who know your name and open your email because they like hearing from you. Those pieces don’t need a keyword. They need a voice.
Knowing which piece is which is my job.
AI Detection Tools: Since You're Going to Hear About It
There are tools that claim to detect whether AI wrote something; they give it a score. If you run my work through one, it may come back flagged as partially AI-written.
I’d rather tell you that myself than have you find out and wonder.
Here’s why it happens. Those tools don’t really detect AI. They detect predictability — clean sentence structure, consistent rhythm, tidy transitions. Which is another way of saying they detect professional writing. They routinely flag work written entirely by hand. If it contains an em dash or the Rule of 3, it probably will get flagged.
And now, because there are AI detection tools, there are also humanizer tools where someone can take raw AI output and spin it to appear “more human” (I cannot make this stuff up).
So the score tells you almost nothing worth knowing because all these tools are doing is making money off of those who are trying to gamify content creation.
Here’s what really matters: none of the systems that actually decide whether you get found are asking whether AI wrote the content. They don’t care.
Google has said that it doesn’t care how content was produced. It cares whether the content is original, useful, and backed by real experience (E-E-A-T). Its enforcement targets thin, mass-produced content designed to game rankings — and it holds human writing to exactly the same standard. AI assistants work the same way. They cite content containing information they couldn’t have generated themselves.
Which brings it back around to my process – one I’ve held for nearly two decades. The reason to run my content through six passes isn’t to beat a detector. It’s that the passes are what put your actual experience onto the page, which not only adds a personalized element to your content, but also increases search visibility.
Let’s put it this way: If two pieces of marketing content both score 60% AI, and mine contains the dental molding you created on a Sunday morning and the other one doesn’t, mine will get cited, and the other one won’t.
And Now There's Watermarking, Which is a Different Animal
In August 2026, Anthropic began embedding invisible watermarks in text generated by Claude. Not a guess based on sentence rhythm — an actual signal, deliberately placed, that travels with the text when it’s copied and pasted. Other AI companies are moving in the same direction. European regulation is driving it, but it applies everywhere.
This is a real change, and I’d rather explain it than let you find out from someone selling you something.
It also has a problem baked into it, and the company that built it says so plainly in its own documentation: the mark tells you Claude had a hand in the content. It does not tell you Claude wrote the content.
Those are not the same thing, yet the gap between them is enormous.
Run a paragraph you wrote by hand through Claude to check the grammar, and it can come back marked. Ask it to translate something. Ask it to tighten a sentence. Same mark. The signal doesn’t distinguish between a machine that generated a page and a machine that fixed a comma in one you wrote yourself.
So a watermark answers exactly one question. Did AI touch this at any point?
That’s a question with a yes-or-no answer and almost no useful information. Because I’ve already told you my answer. AI touched it. It touched the first draft, and then I took it offline and spent several more hours working through the steps (listed above). Then, when I’m all done with my steps, I may push it back into an AI tool to tighten it up (because I feel it’s too wordy in a spot or two) or check the grammar. Now it will carry a watermark.
So, if you ever run something I wrote through a checker and it comes back marked, you’ll have learned nothing you didn’t read here first.
Last reviewed: August 12, 2026. This area is changing quickly, and I update this page when it does.
The Part that Comes First: Strategy
Everything on this page assumes we already know what to write.
Most companies don’t. Not because they aren’t paying attention, but because the honest answer takes real digging — into the content already on your site, into your analytics and Search Console data, into what AI is currently saying about you.
- Which service lines are you invisible for?
- Who’s being recommended instead of you?
- Which of your existing pages are doing nothing at all?
That’s a diagnosis, and it comes before any content decision.
You wouldn’t start a job without a set of drawings and weeks of prep: permits pulled, subs lined up, someone deciding where the dumpster and the port-a-potty go. I don’t start a content engagement without a roadmap, for the same reason. The cost of finding out you built the wrong thing is highest after you’ve built it.