A large share of what people ask assistants is instructional. Tutoring and teaching make up around a tenth of ChatGPT queries, how-to advice another chunk, and specific-information requests the largest slice of all. That tells you the shape the winning content should take. Questions and answers, and ordered steps, are not just tidy formatting, they mirror exactly how people ask and how assistants prefer to answer.
Structure that doubles as schema
There is a technical bonus to writing this way. A genuine question and answer section can be marked up as FAQ schema, and a genuine set of ordered instructions as HowTo schema. That markup hands an assistant a pre-labelled, unambiguous version of your content, which makes it far easier to quote correctly. You are not tricking anything, you are describing your own content in a language machines read natively, on top of the words humans read.
The steps below show the pattern, and this page itself carries an FAQ block underneath, so you can see the same technique in use. The broader markup layer is covered in structured data for your brand.
Start from real questions
Collect the actual questions your buyers and support team hear, in their own words. These are the phrases people type into an assistant, so they are the phrases your content should answer.
Answer each one directly
Give a clear, self-contained answer to each question in one or two sentences before adding any detail. An assistant should be able to lift the answer without needing the rest of the page.
Order any process as steps
Where you explain how to do something, break it into numbered steps with a short title and a plain instruction each. Ordered steps map cleanly onto how assistants present a process.
Mark it up
Add FAQ schema to your question and answer sections and HowTo schema to your step sequences, so the assistant reads a labelled version of exactly what the human sees.
What this means for your business
Turn your most common buyer questions into a real FAQ and your key processes into real step-by-step guides, then mark both up. You will serve the tutoring, how-to and information seekers who make up a huge share of AI queries, and you will hand the assistant content it can quote with confidence. The writing habits that make this work are in writing content an AI can quote.
Does FAQ schema help with AI visibility?
It helps by giving assistants a clearly labelled question and answer pair they can quote without guessing. The content still has to genuinely answer the question, but the markup removes ambiguity about what the answer is.
What is HowTo schema?
HowTo schema is structured markup that labels an ordered set of steps as instructions. It lets search engines and assistants present your process as a clear sequence, which suits the large share of queries that ask how to do something.