The direct answer

A Who This Is For section is a short paragraph near the top of a content page that explicitly lists 3 to 4 specific user scenarios the page is written for. It goes immediately after your answer-first opening paragraph. It is the single most powerful ASI technique available because it tells AI systems exactly which user situations your content serves — causing your page to be matched to every AI query from users in those situations, using whatever phrasing they choose.

Why it works — the scenario matching mechanism

When someone asks an AI assistant a question, they describe their situation. “I run a small business website,” “I just switched from Yoast to Rank Math,” “I have been doing SEO for years but my site never shows up in ChatGPT.” The AI matches their described situation to content that addresses that situation. A Who This Is For section gives the AI explicit scenario descriptions to match against — rather than requiring the AI to infer applicable scenarios from the body content.

This is why the section has disproportionate impact on citation breadth. A page optimized for “FAQ schema WordPress” might rank well for that specific query and its close variants. The same page with a Who This Is For section listing four specific user scenarios gets cited for dozens of conversational queries from users in those scenarios — “I have a WordPress site and want to show up in AI answers,” “I set up Rank Math but I don’t know if I’m using it right,” “I heard FAQ schema helps with ChatGPT citations” — none of which match the original keyword but all of which match the scenarios described in the section.

The anatomy of an effective Who This Is For section

An effective Who This Is For section has four elements:

1. A heading that signals the section clearly — “Who this is for,” “This guide is for you if,” or “This is the right page if you…”
2. 3 to 4 specific scenarios — each one describes a real situation a real person would be in. Not “WordPress users” but “you have a WordPress site that ranks in Google but never shows up in ChatGPT answers.”
3. Specificity that creates recognition — each scenario should make the relevant reader think “that’s exactly me.” Vague scenarios (“if you have a website”) create no recognition and earn no citation benefit.
4. Natural phrasing that mirrors AI query language — write the scenarios the way users phrase their situations when talking to AI, not the way you would phrase a target audience description in a marketing document.

A complete worked example

Here is a Who This Is For section for a page about adding FAQ schema in WordPress:

What makes a scenario specific enough

The test for scenario specificity: if you removed a scenario from the list, would a specific type of person notice their situation was no longer described? If yes, the scenario is specific enough. If the scenario is so broad that removing it would not exclude any identifiable group, it is too vague to produce citation benefit.

• Too vague: “You want to improve your website’s SEO”
• Specific enough: “You have a WordPress site getting decent Google traffic but you have never appeared as a cited source in a Perplexity or ChatGPT answer”
• Too vague: “You are a business owner with a website”
• Specific enough: “You run a service business and your clients increasingly say they found competitors through AI assistants before ever searching on Google”

Where to place it on the page

The Who This Is For section goes immediately after your answer-first opening paragraph and before your first H2 section. This placement is important: the opening paragraph gives AI systems the direct answer they need for extraction. The Who This Is For section gives them the scenario matching signals they need for citation targeting. Together they create the most citable passage combination on any page.

For the complete ASI guide covering all techniques including TL;DR boxes, comparison content, and scenario-specific writing, see the full ASI guide at teachmeoptimization.com/asi.

How this connects to the other five disciplines

ASI is a writing discipline applied to every piece of content you publish — it works in combination with AEO (which structures pages for extraction), GEO (which builds topical authority), ANI (which ensures AI crawlers can access and read your content), and SEO (which handles keyword rankings and technical health). Content that is well-structured for AEO extraction, lives on a topically authoritative GEO site, is accessible to AI crawlers via ANI, and is written conversationally for ASI matching consistently outperforms content that only addresses one or two of these disciplines.

The ASI implementation habit

Unlike ANI (largely a one-time technical setup) or GEO (a content architecture project), ASI is a continuous writing practice. Every piece of content you publish should pass the read-aloud test, include a Who This Is For section, use second person throughout, and have a TL;DR box if it is over 1,000 words. Building these habits into your standard writing process takes about two weeks of conscious practice before they become automatic.

For existing content, prioritize your top 10 pages by traffic and do a full ASI retrofit on each — adding the TL;DR box, Who This Is For section, and voice pass. These pages already have traffic and topical authority signals working in their favor. Adding ASI improvements on top of existing content that is already being crawled produces the fastest citation rate improvements of any single optimization action available.

Related ASI guides

How to write a Who This Is For section · TL;DR boxes for AI citation · The full ASI checklist

The complete ASI guide library at teachmeoptimization.com/asi covers all 10 topics — from understanding how AI users phrase questions to the writing techniques that generate the most citations.