Site structure · Practice
Answer-first writing
Also known as: Inverted pyramid
What is Inverted pyramid?
Answer-first writing opens every section with one sentence that fully answers the section's question and names its subject, before any context or caveat.
It is the inverted pyramid applied at paragraph level, and it makes passages retrievable and quotable on their own.
Related entities
- Zero-click searchZero-click search is a search that ends on the results page — answered by a snippet, map, panel or AI summary — without a click to any website.
- Answer Engine OptimizationAnswer Engine Optimization (AEO) shapes content so a search engine or voice assistant can lift one passage from your page as the direct answer to a question.
- Retrieval-augmented generationRetrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a technique in which a language model retrieves relevant documents first and then writes its answer grounded in them.
- Entity hub pageAn entity hub page is the single canonical page a site maintains for one entity, defining it, listing its relationships and linking to every article that discusses it.
Field notes covering Inverted pyramid
- Answer-First Writing: The Inverted Pyramid for MachinesPut the answer in sentence one under a question-shaped heading. The four rules that make a paragraph quotable by snippets, voice and AI assistants — with an interactive before/after.
- Zero-Click Search: What to Measure When Nobody Clicks58.5% of U.S. Google searches end without an open-web click, and AI summaries halve click rates. The metrics that replace sessions and rank.
- How AI Assistants Read a Website: Crawl to CitationThe five machines between your page and a recommendation — crawl, render, chunk, retrieve, compose — and an interactive robots.txt matrix for AI crawlers.
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