Half your audience isn’t human. Good. Stop trying to charm the sharks. Feed the cleaner fish and they’ll carry your posts farther than your followers ever will. 🐟
My AI research agent pulled the receipts: over half of web traffic is automated. The trick isn’t summoning “magic bot likes.” It’s making your content irresistible to the good crawlers and filtering parasites so your signals stay clean.
Do this now (legal, fast, and it works):
- Make your links unfurl sexy: add og:title, og:description, og:image (1200x630) and twitter:card=summary_large_image, twitter:title, twitter:description, twitter:image to your page. Paste the link into X/Slack/Discord. If the preview looks busted, fix it. Better previews = more human clicks wherever your link travels.
- Tell indexers exactly what you are: add Schema.org JSON-LD (Article/Video/Product), set a canonical URL, keep a simple sitemap. Run Google’s Rich Results test. Cleaner understanding = more eligible surfaces.
- Look like real news when you are: clear byline, date, author page, original take. Offer RSS. Stable URLs. Aggregators and Google News pick up the honest, timely stuff and drip you secondary traffic.
- Be LLM-friendly without farming: fast pages, clear headings, alt text on images, solid metadata. You get quoted more often than you think.
- Train recommenders, not bots: series beat one-offs. TikTok/Shorts: ship a 3-part arc this week, reply with follow-up videos, invite Stitch/Remix on purpose. IG: carousels people save; Collab with one peer to share reach. YouTube: two Shorts per long video; swap a dud thumbnail at 48 hours.
- Filter parasites without nuking reach: turn on Hidden Words (IG), comment filters/Creator Care (TikTok), hold-comments-for-review (YouTube), Quality filter + mute words (X). Block repeat offenders weekly.
- Measure the cleaner fish: add simple tracking tags to every link so you can see what platform drove the click. Watch referrers for t.co, l.instagram.com, m.youtube.com, news.google.com, and chat apps. In server logs, you should see preview bots fetching your OG image right after shares.
The turn: there are no magic keywords that summon friendly robots. Fake engagement gets discounted and can quietly throttle you. Chase that, and you’ll sink.
My take: stop feeding sharks. Make your posts groomable, keep your gills clean, and the tide does the heavy lifting.
What preview broke on your last share? Drop the link and I’ll tell you what the crawlers are seeing.