Your How-to Is Dead – You Just Don’t Know It Yet
When was the last time you clicked through to a website from a Google search, or did you just accept the AI summary?
I searched for the best layout for adding persimmons to a deer food plot, as companion trees to add along with chestnuts. One of the challenges of persimmons is that they do not self-pollinate, and you won’t know which trees are male or female until 10 years in. How do you layout the trees if the 5 you included in your plot all turn out to be female? That’s a lot of space to take a long term bet on.
Then I caught myself doing what I do far too often – I took the Google AI summary as “good enough” and was about to move on. But the tree spacing listed in the AI summary did not make sense, so I clicked through to the top search result and got my real answer.
I bet most people never clicked through. I know I almost didn’t.
Someone had an original take on something, and a different way of seeing it. Google’s AI scraped that unique voice, stripped out the person behind it, and served it up as a summary. Now it is Clean and Efficient with no need to visit the actual site. And no need to know who wrote it or why they think that way.
The “How-to” got eaten. The person behind it became invisible. And that guy’s website and online business never get visited.
How I Got Here
When Perpend and I started the podcast, we started with the “Why”. Why build community. Why your worldview matters. Why struggle is normal. That was the whole point of those early conversations, two guys trying to figure out what was real.
Over the years, I made more How-to content. Partly because I was learning things and wanted to share them (how to graft, how to stratify chestnuts, how to build a food plot). Because it scored higher, with more clicks, and (hopefully) more engagement. The SEO plugin on my website gives me a score for my page headline, and if I start it with “How to,” I am already at 75% before I even write a word. The algorithm rewards that How-to like a dog treat. Sad, but so efficient!
I leaned into it, and drifted somewhat from where Perpend and I started.
And now Google is eating the thing I drifted toward and presenting it as its own. (plagiarism).
Your How-to Is Dead (You Just Don’t Know It Yet)
“How to plant a chestnut tree” can be scraped, summarized, and served in an AI answer box. Spacing, soil prep, watering schedule. Why would anyone click through to my site when the answer is sitting right there in the search results?
My click-throughs have dropped off.
But “why I grow my own chestnut trees from seed instead of buying them from a catalog” – that requires my dead trees from Oregon, my puny trees from Michigan that sat there for six years mocking me, my lucky break with two forgotten trees at a local elementary school. That’s a story with failures and specific details from my land in Kansas. Google can’t summarize that into a box because the value isn’t the information, it’s the person and the place behind it.
“Seeds Have a Memory” is not a How-to. There’s no step-by-step. You can’t scrape the thesis out of it because the thesis lives inside the stories of dead trees and Kansas weather and a friend mentioning some chestnuts nobody wanted. An AI summary could tell you “buy locally adapted seeds” in one sentence. But that sentence doesn’t change how you think. The article does (at least I hope it does) because it earns the conclusion through what actually happened.
“How-to” is information. “Why” is worldview. Information can be copied. Worldview has to be lived.
What This Means for My Content
I moved my focus from How-to to the Why.
My Why.
Instead of saying “you should…”, I say “I did.”
AI is summarizing every How-to search and people are settling for that and not clicking through to my website.
But it can’t readily summarize the Why.
My Why.
Your Why Can’t be Summarized
Your “Why” cannot be taken. It is your story, your failures, your place, your specific unique path to seeing things differently – that’s all yours. No algorithm can summarize it because the value isn’t the information, it’s you.
I’m not saying stop teaching people how to do things. I’m saying wrap the “How” inside the “Why”. Let the practical stuff ride inside a story only you can tell.
In a land of AI slop, writing Human will be more valued.
Your “Why” is the only thing that will survive what’s coming.
Next time you sit down to write something, before you type “How to,” ask yourself: Why do I do this? Start there and explain your Why. It is much more interesting. The How-to will still be in there, but it’ll be wrapped in something Google can’t steal.
That is why you should be Moving from How to Why in the Age of AI.
Look, the world is changing. You can feel it.
Don’t lose hope.
Live Local. Grow your own food as much as possible, even if it is on a balcony. Share seeds and the Local Wisdom of “what works” with your community.
I am a guy who grows chestnuts in Kansas, where we can go from 33 degrees to 96 in two days. Sometimes it feels like the odds are against me.
I write about building a real life instead of borrowing one.
Skills Over Stuff. Plant trees. Grow food. Build community.
Seeds (and trees) have a memory. They remember the place they came from – in Kansas it is those brutal winters, scorching summers, lack of rain for long periods of time.
New York may be Zone 5, but it is not Midwest Zone 5.
So where are your trees and seeds from? And do they know where they’re going?
My Midwest Memory trees are adapted to the Midwest Zones 5-7.
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