How I Use UPWORDS to Write Content Worth Citing

Years ago, I taught marketing management part-time at a local college. One night, a student named Neil pulled a chair up beside my desk and asked me a simple question. What’s the difference between this chair and your desk?

One is to sit on, I said, and the other is to write on.

No, he said. You’re relating the difference, not stating it. He was right. I’d described each one by its function and let him feel the gap. That’s how the mind works. It understands a new thing by relating it to something it already knows.

I’d already named a technique around that idea, back in 1998, and I called it UPWORDS. Back then, the reader was a person holding a sales letter. Today there are two readers, the buyer and the AI the buyer asks first. The technique works on both.

What UPWORDS stands for

UPWORDS stands for Universal Picture Words Or Relatable, Descriptive Sentences.

The acronym is a definition, not a checklist. Use words that paint a picture, in language your reader already shares, built into sentences they can relate to.

It’s the language layer of Power Positioning. A strong position wrapped in words the market can’t decode is a position nobody owns. And in AI search, a position the machine can’t decode is one it won’t repeat.

Why words matter more in AI search

Your content now has two readers. One is the buyer. The other is the AI that reads your pages, decides what you’re about, and decides whether to name you when someone asks.

Both readers struggle with the same kind of copy. “We deliver innovative solutions that drive growth” gives a person nothing to picture and gives a model nothing to pin down. So the model describes you in generic terms, or names someone it understood better.

That’s why I treat UPWORDS as visibility work now, not only copywriting. It’s how the position survives the trip, whether that’s into a person’s head or into an AI answer.

Picture words make claims quotable

AI doesn’t cite whole pages. It lifts passages. A passage that makes sense on its own, with a concrete claim inside it, is far easier to lift than one that leans on the paragraph around it.

Early in my career, I watched a news clip of a reporter flying over a forest fire. She said it covered about 240 acres, then said it had grown to about 180 football fields laid back to back. Decades later, I still see the football fields. I had to strain to remember the acres.

Business claims work the same way. “We help firms improve their digital presence” has nothing in it to quote. “We get expert-led firms named when buyers ask ChatGPT who to hire” does. It’s specific, it pictures an outcome, and it stands on its own.

So I build each key section of a page around one claim like that. It’s the same discipline behind SOME, which I explain in how I structure content so AI cites it. Structure makes the claim easy to find. Picture words make it worth quoting.

Relatable language matches how buyers ask

The second half of UPWORDS is relatable language, meaning analogy, metaphor, and the reader’s own vocabulary.

In my early practice, I worked with cosmetic surgeons whose callers wanted a price over the phone. The fix was one line borrowed from an experience nearly everyone shares. Like a dentist, I can’t give you an estimate without seeing your X-rays. A strange request crossed a bridge callers already owned.

In search, the bridge is vocabulary. Buyers don’t type your internal jargon into ChatGPT. They type the problem in their own words. If your page describes the problem the way they do, it matches the question. If it uses your team’s shorthand, it doesn’t.

That’s the gap Andy Crestodina’s team found when they reviewed 100 AI visibility audit tools. Only three asked anything about the buyer. It’s also why my Bullseye Method starts with the buyer, in their words.

Varied expression covers more questions

In my copywriting days, I taught people to repeat the idea and vary the expression. Say the same point four ways, and each version catches a reader the last one missed.

AI search rewards the same habit. When someone asks an AI tool a question, the system often expands it into a set of related searches behind the scenes, a process Mike King and others call query fan-out. A page that covers one idea in the different ways buyers phrase it has more chances to match.

I did this on my consulting pricing post this week. I added a column listing the other names for each pricing model, like hourly, fixed-fee, deliverables-based, value-based, and success fee. Same three models, more of the words buyers use for them.

It’s what I call Fan-out in the Four Doors I check in an AI visibility audit. Cover the full set of questions buyers ask, in the words they use.

Memorable phrasing travels

Picture words do one more thing. They give people a line worth repeating, and lines that get repeated end up on more pages, which are the pages AI draws from.

I watched it happen this month. Mike King described an AI answer as “earned media composed by a machine.” Within days, Rand Fishkin had pointed his readers to Mike’s argument, and I’d quoted the line in my own posts.

A vague claim doesn’t get repeated. A picture does. Every repetition puts the idea, with a name attached, on another page. That’s Door 1 of the Four Doors, the sources others publish about you, and it’s where brand memory gets built.

Emotional and positive words still convert

Visibility gets you found. The click that does happen still has to convert, and that’s where the rest of UPWORDS earns its keep.

Instead of	Try	Why it lands
Cost	Investment	A cost is money leaving. An investment is money working.
House	Home	A house is a structure. A home is what happens inside it.
Virtually painless	Minimal discomfort	The word left in the reader’s head is “comfort,” not “pain.”
But	And	“But” erases everything before it. “And” lets both halves stand.

The brain can’t process a negative without picturing it first. Tell someone a procedure is painless, and the word left in their head is pain. None of these swaps change the facts. They change how the facts feel.

This is where UPWORDS meets proof. Perceptual proof, the P in FORCEPS, turns facts into something the reader can feel, and picture words are how I do it. The football fields didn’t change the size of that fire, only how big it felt.

What UPWORDS is not

UPWORDS isn’t a license to oversell. Concrete claims get quoted, which means an inflated one gets quoted too, and repeated, and eventually held against you. Picture words only work when they’re true.

It also can’t replace a position. No amount of word craft rescues a message that stands for nothing. UPWORDS carries a position to the buyer and the machine. It can’t invent one.

And words are only the first thing buyers read. They also judge your design, your details, and the small signals you never meant to send. That’s the Ketchup Principle.

If you want to see how AI describes your firm today, and why, that’s part of what I look at in The Gauge.

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