I just finished reading Smart Brevity by Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, and Roy Schwartz, the founders of Axios. It’s a sharp, well-argued book that makes a compelling case for saying less. Lead with the most important thing. Cut everything that doesn’t earn its place. Respect the reader’s time as if it’s the scarcest resource in the room, because it is.
I found myself nodding along throughout. The principles translate directly to business communications: pitches, emails, presentations, and social media. Most business writing (particularly when fueled by AI) is considerably longer than it needs to be, and most of it suffers for it.
But partway through, I kept running into the same tension, one that VandeHei and his co-authors don’t really have to deal with because they’re running a news operation, not trying to rank in Google.
The tension is this: the same business that needs to be brief and direct in its communications also needs to publish substantial, comprehensive content to achieve its SEO and GEO objectives. Those two imperatives can pull in opposite directions. How you resolve them matters quite a bit.
Brevity is a virtue in a pitch, an email, and a social post. It can be a liability on a page that needs to demonstrate topical authority to a search engine or an AI system. The skill is knowing which context you’re writing for.
What Smart Brevity Gets Right
The core argument of the book is that most communications are built around the writer’s need to feel thorough rather than the reader’s need to understand quickly. We front-load with context, bury the point, and add qualifications that serve our own anxiety rather than the reader’s comprehension.
The Axios formula is deliberately structured: lead with what matters most, follow with the essential context, then offer the depth for those who want it. The reader controls how far they go. Nothing is hidden behind a wall of preamble.
Applied to business communications, this is a genuinely valuable discipline. Your homepage headline should not be a paragraph. Your email subject line should not be a sentence. Your LinkedIn post should not require three scrolls before it gets to the point. In all of these contexts, the Smart Brevity framework is excellent guidance, and most business owners would communicate more effectively by internalising it.
The principle that brevity is a form of respect for the reader is one I’ve held for a long time. The Australian business audience in particular has limited tolerance for corporate waffle. Get to the point, demonstrate that you understand the problem, and make it easy to take the next step. That’s it.
Where the Tension with SEO and GEO Begins
Here’s where it gets more complicated for businesses with a digital presence.
Search engines evaluate your website content, in part, as evidence of expertise. A page that covers a topic in a single paragraph signals something very different to Google than a page that covers the same topic with genuine depth: addressing related questions, exploring nuance, providing context, and demonstrating that the author actually knows what they’re talking about. The latter earns authority. The former earns very little.
This is not about gaming word counts. The idea that longer content automatically ranks better is a misreading of how search works. What search engines are actually rewarding is comprehensive coverage of a topic. If you can cover a topic comprehensively in 600 words, that’s fine. If a topic genuinely requires 1,800 words to cover thoroughly, thin content will not compete.
The GEO dimension makes this even more pointed. AI tools like Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity are synthesising answers to user queries from across the web. The content they draw on is not the content that made the strongest first impression in a headline. It’s the content that most thoroughly and clearly addresses a topic. Brief, punchy content rarely gets cited in AI-generated responses. Substantive, well-structured content does.
So the business that follows Smart Brevity principles on its website service pages and publishes nothing else is likely leaving significant search and GEO visibility on the table.
The Resolution: Different Content, Different Jobs
The good news is that this tension is resolvable. The mistake is treating all content as if it serves the same purpose and needs the same approach. It doesn’t.
Think of your content in two distinct categories, each with its own brief.
Conversion content is where Smart Brevity applies most directly. Your homepage, your service pages, your about page, your contact page. These are pages where a human visitor is making a decision. They need to understand quickly what you do, who you do it for, and why you’re the right choice. Padding and jargon are your enemies here. Lead with the point. Be specific. Make the next step obvious. A homepage that takes three scrolls to get to a value proposition is a homepage that is losing visitors.
Authority content is where depth earns its place. Your blog, your guides, your case studies, your FAQs. These are pages whose primary job is to demonstrate expertise, attract search traffic, and build the body of topical authority that makes your broader website credible. Here, the Smart Brevity discipline applies at the sentence and paragraph level, cut the padding, write efficiently, respect the reader’s time, but the overall piece needs enough substance to genuinely cover the topic. A 200-word blog post is not a blog post. It’s a paragraph that hasn’t earned a URL of its own.
The synthesis is efficient depth. Write as concisely as the topic allows. Cut every sentence that doesn’t add meaning. But don’t cut the meaning itself in the name of brevity. A well-written 1,200-word article that covers a topic thoroughly, structured clearly with headings that let the reader navigate, is not in conflict with Smart Brevity principles. It is Smart Brevity applied at the right scale for the job.
The goal is not short content or long content. It’s the right amount of content, written as efficiently as possible, structured so the reader can take exactly as much as they need.
Applying This to Your Website
If you’re thinking about your own website through this lens, here’s a practical way to approach it.
Audit your conversion pages with Smart Brevity as your filter. Read your homepage headline and ask whether it communicates your value proposition in one clear sentence. Read your service pages and ask whether the first paragraph tells the visitor what they need to know or whether it buries the point in background. Apply the Axios test: if someone reads only the first sentence of this page, do they understand what we do and why it matters to them?
Audit your authority content for depth. Look at your blog posts and ask whether each one covers its topic thoroughly enough to be genuinely useful to someone researching that subject. A post that scratches the surface of a topic contributes very little to your SEO or GEO objectives. Better to publish fewer, more substantive pieces than a high volume of thin content that doesn’t answer the question.
And at every level, apply the sentence-by-sentence discipline that Smart Brevity advocates. Every sentence should earn its place. If you remove a sentence and the meaning doesn’t change, remove it. That principle is compatible with writing at any length.
A Note on Structure
One area where Smart Brevity and content strategy are in perfect alignment is structure. VandeHei’s framework is explicit about leading with the most important point and layering depth below it. This mirrors exactly what good SEO content structure looks like: a clear headline, a strong opening that signals what the piece covers, well-organised subheadings that allow the reader to navigate, and a logical flow from broad to specific.
That structure serves human readers, search engine crawlers, and AI systems simultaneously. It’s not a compromise between brevity and depth. It’s a writing discipline that makes both possible at once.
If you haven’t read Smart Brevity, it’s worth your time, particularly if you write a lot of internal communications, proposals, or social content. Just don’t let it talk you out of the substantive website content your business needs to compete in search. The two can coexist. In fact, applied correctly, they make each other better.
If you’d like help thinking through your content strategy, including where to invest in depth and where to sharpen your messaging for conversion, get in touch with the HyperWeb team.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long should website content be for SEO?
There is no universal ideal length. The right length for any piece of content is whatever it takes to thoroughly answer the question or topic it addresses, without padding. For core service pages, 500 to 1,000 words is typically sufficient. For blog posts targeting competitive search terms or covering complex topics, 1,000 to 2,000 words is more appropriate. The key principle is depth and relevance, not word count for its own sake.
What is Smart Brevity?
Smart Brevity is a communication framework developed by the founders of Axios, outlined in their book of the same name. It advocates for leading with the most important information, using plain language, and respecting the reader’s time by removing everything that doesn’t earn its place. The core principle is that brevity is a form of respect, and that most business communications are significantly longer than they need to be.
Does brevity hurt SEO?
Brevity as a writing discipline, cutting padding, jargon, and redundancy while keeping substantive depth, is entirely compatible with strong SEO. Brevity that results in thin content lacking genuine depth is a different matter. The goal is efficient depth: content that covers a topic thoroughly without wasting the reader’s time.
How does content length affect GEO and AI search visibility?
AI search tools favour content that comprehensively covers a topic with clarity and structure. Thin content is unlikely to be cited in AI-generated responses. However, length alone does not guarantee visibility. The combination of genuine depth, clear structure, and efficient writing is what earns visibility in both traditional and AI-powered search.
