The short verdict
- Generated copy is not wrong. It is vague, and vague reads as nobody in particular.
- A handful of word choices and sentence shapes give it away faster than anything in the design.
- The fix is not better adjectives. It is replacing claims with facts only you could write.
01Why readers notice
Most visitors could not tell you what makes a sentence sound generated. They just stop believing it. A headline that could sit on any company’s site tells them nothing about yours, so they skim, then leave.
Language models write the most probable sentence for the prompt. For a landing page, the most probable sentence is one that has appeared on thousands of other landing pages. That is the whole problem in one line.
02The patterns we cut first
1. Verbs that promise without saying
Unlock, empower, transform, supercharge, streamline, revolutionise. Each one claims a result without naming it. “Unlock your team’s potential” could sell project software, a coaching course or a coffee machine.
Rewrite it with what actually changes: “Plan the week in one place, so Monday’s stand-up takes ten minutes instead of forty.”
2. The scene-setting opener
“In today’s fast-paced digital landscape...” The reader already lives in today. Delete the first sentence of any section that starts this way and read it again. It almost always gets better.
3. Lists of three, everywhere
“Fast, reliable and secure.” “Simple, powerful, beautiful.” Models love groups of three because they sound finished. When every paragraph ends in a triplet, the rhythm becomes the tell. Keep the one word that is true and provable, and prove it.
4. Seamless, effortless, cutting-edge
These describe a feeling the visitor is supposed to have rather than something they can check. If a setup really takes two minutes, say two minutes. If it does not, the adjective will not help.
5. “Whether you’re X or Y”
“Whether you’re a solo founder or a global enterprise...” This sentence tries to include everyone and so speaks to no one. Pick the buyer you actually want and write to them.
6. The tidy closing line
“Ready to take your business to the next level?” Generated sections like to end with a rhetorical question or a neat summary. Real copy can just stop when it has said the thing.
03How we rewrite a section
We do not run the copy through a “make it human” prompt. That swaps one set of habits for another. We rewrite by hand, in this order:
- Find the fact. For every claim, ask what is true underneath it: a number, a feature, a time saved, a thing a customer said in a call.
- Name the reader. Write to one person with one problem. “If you run a two-person bakery” beats “for businesses of all sizes”.
- Cut the frame. Remove openers, summaries and rhetorical questions. Start with the point.
- Read it out loud. If you would not say it to a customer across a table, it does not go on the page.
- Vary the length. Mix short sentences with longer ones. Uniform sentence length is its own giveaway.
“If a competitor could paste your headline onto their site and nothing would feel wrong, it is not your headline yet.”
04A quick test for your own site
Copy your homepage text into a document and swap your company name for a competitor’s. Then read it. Every sentence that still works is a sentence that needs a fact added. On many generated sites, that is most of the page.
Then search the page for the words above. Ten minutes with a find-and-replace list will not fix the copy, but it shows you exactly where to start.
05Questions people ask
Does Google penalise AI-written copy?
Google has said it judges content on whether it is helpful, not on how it was produced. The practical risk is different: vague copy does not answer specific searches, so it ranks for very little, and visitors who land on it do not stay.
Can I still use AI to draft copy?
Yes, as a first draft. Treat it like notes from someone who has never met your customers. Keep the structure if it helps, then replace every claim with something specific.
Is there a list of banned words I can use?
A list helps you find the problem lines, but swapping one word for a synonym rarely fixes them. The sentence usually needs a fact, not a different adjective.
How much of my copy needs rewriting?
Usually the hero, the feature section and the calls to action carry most of the weight. Send us the link and we will mark the lines that matter most.
