The overlap is larger than the conflict
Clear structure, direct answers, specific facts, and self-contained paragraphs serve a skimming reader and a retrieval system identically. Almost everything AIEO asks for is what a good editor would have asked for anyway.
Where they diverge, slightly
Models benefit from repetition of the key entity and plain heading language; human readers enjoy variation and wit. That is the entire genuine tension, and it is smaller than the industry around it suggests.
There is no AI writing style. There is clear writing, which machines happen to parse well.
Resolve it in favour of the reader
A page written to please a retrieval system and irritate a person converts nobody, and conversion is the point. Buyers arriving from an AI citation still have to be persuaded by what they find — which is what a confident page does.
The failure mode has a name
Writing primarily for machines produces the padded, repetitive prose that a decade of keyword-first SEO already taught readers to distrust, and that engines now discount. It is the same error with new vocabulary.
Add structure, don’t subtract voice
Keep the argument, the point of view, and the writing. Add question-shaped headings and an answer in the first sentence of each section. That is a purely additive change, and it is why your best page can be fixed without being rewritten.
The test that settles it
Read the page aloud. If it sounds like a person explaining something to a colleague, it will serve both audiences. If it sounds like it was assembled to contain phrases, no amount of markup will rescue it.