AI Visibility by Content Length

Posted by: David Hall

Neil Patel is one of the SEO experts we follow. We subscribe to his newsletter and participate in some of his webinars. He has recently been putting out a lot of research on AI-assisted search.

We got an email last week where he shared results of a test he did on the relationship between content length and AI visibility.

Here is the chart:

When I got this, it reminded me of dealing with this issue before. About 7 ½ years ago I wrote a post for our Infinity Dental Web brand, Does Word Count Affect SEO?. We had heard from competitors that there was a supposed optimum in content length, but experts we relied on all agreed with us that it was the quality of the content that affected SEO and word count had nothing to do with it. I am of the opinion that this is the case here, and let me illustrate it with some math.

Let’s take as an example a blog post of 1600 words, which gives us, by the chart, maximum visibility—a rating of 1.00. Now let us take that post and split it into two posts of 800 words each, which is closer to our average post on this blog. While each post has a visibility rating of 0.85, added together we have a rating of 1.70, a 70% increase. This actually validates my opinion that, rather than trying to expand content to some pre-determined length, you would be better off cutting out the fluff and getting right to the point.

In fairness, I need to add that Neil Patel does say that a longer post would naturally be cited more because it has more content. But I will also add that it is interesting to see the rate actually decrease for longer content, which reinforces the idea that longer posts should maybe be pared down to cut out redundancy and irrelevant details.