AI website copy: what to keep and what to rewrite

AI writes a competent website in seconds. Competent is the problem: it is exactly good enough to publish and exactly generic enough that nobody remembers it.

The useful question is not whether to use it. It is which parts of a site you can hand over completely, and which parts cost you money if you do.

What AI writes well

Structure. Turning a jumble of things you do into an ordered set of pages with sensible headings is a genuine strength, and it is the part most business owners find hardest.

Plain descriptions of plain things. Opening hours, service areas, what is included, how a process works. Factual paragraphs that need to be clear rather than distinctive.

The tenth version of the same page. If you serve nine towns and need nine pages that differ correctly, this is work no human should be doing by hand.

The first draft of anything. Editing beats staring. A mediocre paragraph you can react to is more useful than an empty page you cannot.

What you should always rewrite

The sentence about why you. This is the whole site in one line, and it is the one thing AI cannot know. It will produce something defensible — "combining quality craftsmanship with personal service" — which is a sentence your competitor can also use, which means it says nothing.

Anything a customer can hold you to. Prices, guarantees, delivery times, what is included. Not because the text will be badly written, but because it may be confidently wrong, and a confident wrong price is a refund.

Your actual voice, where it matters. If you are funny, the site should be funny. Generated copy defaults to a register best described as regional bank — warm, careful, forgettable.

Anything about people. Team descriptions, your own story, why you started. Invented detail here is not a style problem, it is a lie with your name on it.

A test before you publish

Read your homepage and ask one question: could a competitor put their logo on this page unchanged?

If yes, you have published a category description rather than a business. The fix is rarely more words — it is usually two or three specifics. The town you work in. The thing you refuse to do. The price. The number of years. Specifics are unrepeatable, and that is what makes them yours.

The rule of thumb

Let AI write anything a well-briefed stranger could write correctly. Write yourself anything that requires being you.

That line falls in a different place for every business, but it almost always leaves the same short list in your hands: the opening sentence, the prices, the promises and the story. Four things. Everything else on the site can be generated and then read carefully.

This is the copy-level version of a wider point about what these tools do and do not do — the full version is in the limits of AI website builders. What happens to distinctiveness when everyone builds this way is its own question.

Frequently asked

Will Google penalise AI-written website text?

The problem with generated copy is rarely a penalty; it is that it says what every competitor's page says. Text that is specific to your business, your prices, your area and your limits, performs better because it answers something only you can answer.

How much should I edit generated copy?

Read it once for accuracy and once for voice. Accuracy matters most on prices, guarantees and anything about people; voice matters most on the homepage opening and anywhere you would normally be funny or direct.