I was building a slide deck last week... technical content, thoughtful structure, a solid wall of text I was genuinely proud of. Somewhere around slide four I had a moment of uncomfortable clarity.
Nobody is reading this.
Not because it's bad. Because nobody reads anything anymore. And AI-generated content isn't causing that. It's just proving it.
The Research Was Telling Us This for Decades
Back in 1997, Jakob Nielsen and the Nielsen Norman Group published eye-tracking research showing that users read roughly 20–28% of words on a typical webpage. They scan in an F-pattern: a horizontal sweep across the top, a shorter sweep a bit further down, then a vertical skim down the left edge. That's it.
The research has been replicated and updated many times since. The pattern holds.
Then in 2014, Tony Haile at Chartbeat — analyzing data across billions of page views — reported that 55% of visitors spent fewer than 15 seconds on a page. Scroll depth data from the same era consistently showed most readers never made it past the midpoint of an article.
So let's be precise about what AI-generated content actually revealed: the bar for "good enough to publish" was always lower than we wanted to admit, because the bar for "read carefully" was already underground.
Your README Is Unread. Your Docs Are Unread. Your Blog Post Was Unread.
If you've been writing technical content for any meaningful stretch of time, you've felt this. The PR where you wrote a detailed description that someone clearly didn't read before commenting. The documentation page that generates the same support ticket every week. The README with a Prerequisites section that people routinely skip until something breaks.
This isn't a character flaw in your users. It's a behavior pattern baked in by information overload. We all do it. I do it. You do it.
We skim for the thing that matches our immediate problem. We ctrl+F. We scroll until something catches our eye. We open five tabs and read none of them completely.
AI content farms figured this out before most publishers did, which is why they're effective at scale. They're not fooling careful readers. There aren't enough careful readers to matter for their metrics.
So What Actually Works
None of this means writing is pointless. It means the format has to do work that the reader won't.
Front-load everything. TL;DRs, key takeaways at the top, summary sections before the detail. If the most important sentence is in paragraph six, it will be missed by most people.
Headers are navigation, not decoration. Someone scanning your post is making micro-decisions at every header: is this the part I need? Write headers that answer that question directly.
Short paragraphs aren't just stylistic. White space gives the eye a place to land. Walls of text read as "skip this block" to a scanner.
Code blocks are a rest stop. For a technical audience, a well-formatted code snippet is often more read than the paragraphs around it. Use them strategically.
The first and last sentence of every section carries disproportionate weight. That's where scanners pay attention. Write accordingly.
The Uncomfortable Part
Here's what I keep coming back to: the AI content problem isn't really an AI problem.
It's a publishing-into-a-vacuum problem that we've been doing for years and only now have a mirror for. When a GPT-generated article with thin sourcing and a generic structure outperforms a carefully researched post, that's not AI winning. That's formatting, SEO, and headline copy winning — the same things that were always winning.
The slide deck I was building? I'm still going to make it. But I rebuilt it with one idea per slide, tight headlines, and the details pushed to speaker notes where they belong.
The audience was always skimming. The only new thing is that I stopped pretending otherwise.
Has your approach to technical writing or documentation changed as you've gotten more honest about reading behavior? I'm curious what's actually worked — drop it in the comments.
Top comments (3)
Evan, I’ll share a little secret that every editor and publisher on earth knows (even book publishers). People don’t really read for the content itself anymore — especially in the age of LLMs. They read for the author.
For example, people might read Sylwia no matter what she writes, because the style is light, there’s some distance and humor, and you end up smiling a few times along the way. They read @aaron_rose_0787cc8b4775a0 because he tells stories and explains difficult things through narrative 💖. And I have a feeling people could happily read Evan Lausier as well, because he writes from a really interesting perspective about the everyday dilemmas of developers.
The real key is probably writing regularly and letting the audience get used to you. Everything else? Sure — most of it will just be scanned through the headings.
Sylwia, thank you for the kind mention! 🙏 I very much enjoy your articles as well! Congrats on your acceptance into the AWS Community Builders program! That is a real honor. 🎉 Cheers 🌹❤✨
Don’t worry. Your posts are always fun and informative, and I enjoy reading them. 😄