5 Questions Someone Asks Before They Pick You Over the Next Guy

This is exactly where generic writing falls apart. A blank AI box can produce something competent, but only if you feed it your specialty, your focus, and who you serve best every single time you sit down. Almost nobody keeps that up, so it drifts back to the same middle-of-the-road content everyone else is publishing.

Modern Humans stores what makes your business yours and writes from it every time, so the person reading feels seen instead of sold to.

"Have I heard of them before, or is this the first time?"

People don't hire strangers. They hire the name that already feels familiar, and familiarity comes from showing up more than once.

Here's the part that surprises people. It isn't the single brilliant post that builds trust. It's the steady presence.

The business that shows up every week out-trusts the one that publishes something genius twice a year and then goes quiet.

By the time someone is comparing you to the next guy, one of you feels known and one of you feels new. Consistency is what puts you on the familiar side of that line, week after week, until choosing you feels obvious instead of risky.

"What does everyone else think of them?"

This one used to mean reviews and word of mouth. It still does. But increasingly it also means: what does their AI say?

More and more, people don't search, they ask. They open ChatGPT or Perplexity and say something like "who's a good [your service] for someone in my situation," and the AI answers with a short list of names. To be on that list, the AI has to have encountered you saying real, specific, credible things about what you do.

That only happens if you've put genuine expertise out into the world, in your voice, more than once. Silence makes you invisible to the AI the same way it makes you invisible to a person asking a friend for a referral. Every article and post you publish is material the AI can read, understand, and draw on when it decides who to recommend.

Go ask an AI assistant for someone in your field right now and notice who comes up. The businesses on that list didn't game anything. They just showed up and said something worth trusting, over and over.

"Can I picture what working with them is actually like?"

The last question is the quietest. People want to imagine the relationship before they commit to it. If they can picture how you think, how you talk, what you care about, the leap to hiring you gets small.

This is where your point of view does the heavy lifting. The way you'd explain a decision, the standard you hold the work to, the thing you say to every new client that they won't hear anywhere else. That's not filler.

That's the exact material that lets someone feel like they already know you before the first call.

And it's the hardest part to fake with generic content, because a point of view is the one thing a business only has if it's genuinely theirs. When your articles and posts carry your actual perspective, the reader doesn't just learn what you do. They get a feel for who they'd be working with, and that feeling is usually what tips the choice your way.

Answer the questions before they're asked

Notice what all five have in common. Every one of them gets answered by content that sounds like you and shows up consistently, across your own site and your social channels, drawn from what you actually know.

You're already the expert. You already have the answers to these five questions living in your head, in the things you tell clients every day. The gap is time, and the fact that turning all of that into a steady stream of articles and posts is the task that keeps getting bumped for the actual work.

That's the whole reason to store your knowledge once and let it write from there. When someone is quietly running their audit, deciding between you and the next person, the business that already answered their questions in public is the one they pick.