Using AI to write your website copy, and where it goes wrong

You need words for your website and you’ve been putting it off. A tool like ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini will write a full homepage in about ten seconds, and it reads fine. The trouble is that it reads fine for every other business in your trade too, and some of what it says about you may not be true.

These tools can save you hours. Used carelessly, they produce a site that sounds like a template and now and then makes claims on your behalf that you can’t back up. The difference comes down to what you give them and how closely you check what comes back.

What it’s good for

AI writing tools work best when you already know what you want to say and need help saying it.

• Turning notes into a first draft. Paste in rough bullet points about a service, who it’s for and how it works, and ask for a paragraph. Editing a draft is quicker than staring at a blank page.
• Tightening. Give it a long, rambling paragraph and ask for the same points in half the words.
• Alternative headlines. Ask for ten versions of a heading, then pick one or combine two. Most will be poor. One or two won’t be.
• Checking reading level. Ask it to flag long sentences and any jargon a customer wouldn’t know.

Where it goes wrong

Generic phrasing. These models write the most likely next words. For a plumber’s homepage, the most likely words are the ones already on thousands of other plumbers’ homepages: “reliable”, “trusted”, “tailored to your needs”. That’s how a site built from scratch still ends up looking like a template.

Invented facts. Ask for an About page and it may give you a founding year, a team size or a qualification you never mentioned. It isn’t trying to deceive anyone. It fills gaps with something plausible, and plausible isn’t the same as true.

Made-up claims and reviews. Ask for “a few testimonials” and you’ll get them, from people who don’t exist. Since 6 April 2025, fake reviews have been banned outright in the UK under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024. Use real reviews or none.

The tells. Readers are getting good at spotting AI copy by its habits. Long dashes everywhere. Lists that always come in threes. Words like “seamless” and “cutting edge” on every other line. One of these is nothing, but a page full of them reads as though nobody at the business wrote it.

US spelling. Most tools default to American English: “color”, “optimize”, “center”. Tell it to use UK English, then check anyway, because it slips back.

Brief it with your real details

The more of your business you give it, the less it has to invent. A useful brief covers:

• what you do, and what you don’t;
• the towns you cover;
• the questions customers ask most, with your answers;
• a couple of phrases you use when you talk to customers;
• anything customers have said you do well, in their own words;
• instructions: UK English, no dashes, short sentences, no facts that aren’t in these notes.

That last line matters most. Ask it to mark anything it wasn’t sure of instead of filling the gap. Our guide to what to put on your homepage works as a checklist for what your notes should include.

What Google says about AI content

Google’s Search Central guidance says the test is whether content is helpful and meets its spam policies, not how it was produced. AI can help you research and structure a page. Using it to generate many pages that add nothing for readers can fall under the spam policy on scaled content abuse. Google also tells site owners to fact check and review AI generated content before publishing, and that includes page titles, descriptions and image alt text.

So one AI assisted service page that’s accurate and useful is fine. Fifty near identical “plumber in [town]” pages generated in an afternoon are what that policy is aimed at.

A person who knows the business checks every claim

This is the rule that keeps you out of trouble. Before anything goes live, someone who knows the business reads every sentence and asks two questions: is this true, and would we say it this way to a customer?

Any qualification mentioned has to be one you hold. A promised turnaround has to be one you can meet, and “family run since 1998” had better be right. Read the page aloud as well. Copy that sounds odd spoken usually needs another pass.

If you’d rather have a person write it with you, tell us about your business.