There’s a question on my free audit page: “Is this just AI?” People ask it a lot, and it’s a fair question.
Here’s the honest answer. AI does a lot of the heavy lifting in my work, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But AI copywriting on its own, used by someone who doesn’t know how to drive it, is unreliable, and people can tell:
“Default ChatGPT or Claude output is horrendous copy. I see it used everywhere and it is an immediate bounce for me.”
— Reddit, r/ecommerce
So here’s how I actually use it, the months I wasted using it badly, and where a human still has to do the job.
Why AI copywriting gets a bad name
It sounds like everyone else. Ask a chatbot to “write my homepage” and you’ll get the same smooth, empty sentences it gave the last thousand people who asked.
“They also sound a bit to ChatGPTy.”
— Reddit, r/smallbusiness
“Sorry, but everything about your website screams AI. Copy, design, typography, UI/UX. It’s exactly like every other Claude designed website that every other person has ever made.”
— Reddit, r/ecommerce
People feel short-changed. If you’re paying someone, you want to know a person actually thought about your business.
“I personally would much rather spend such amounts of money thinking a real person will put in work, not go into chat gpt and then sell me that.”
— Reddit, r/FacebookAds
It makes things up, confidently. This is the dangerous one. In June 2025, the High Court in London dealt with two cases where lawyers had put around 23 cases that didn’t exist in front of the court. The President of the King’s Bench Division, Dame Victoria Sharp, warned that AI tools can produce convincing answers that are completely wrong, and that lawyers who rely on them without checking are responsible for the results (Legal Cheek).
If AI can get made-up cases into a courtroom, it can certainly get a made-up statistic onto your homepage.
I’ve been caught by this myself. My own old blog had posts with numbers in them that I couldn’t trace back to any real source. When I checked, I took them down. If I can’t show where a number came from, it doesn’t go on my site, and it won’t go on yours.
The months I wasted using AI badly
When I started building my own tools, I used AI the way most people do. Something would go wrong, I’d write the error into a notes file, paste it into a chatbot (Grok, at the time) and hope.
It kept losing track. It had no memory of where we’d started or what we’d already tried. Every conversation was a fresh start. I spent months stuck in the same place, going round in circles. It was miserable.
The problem wasn’t only the tool. It was how I was using it: no structure, no rules, no way for it to keep hold of the whole job.
Things changed when I found Claude Code. Instead of me copying bits back and forth into a chat window, it worked on my actual project. That’s when things started moving, and it’s what I used to build my website audit tool.
The lesson stuck: AI is only as good as the way you use it. Point it at a vague question and you get a vague, confident answer. Give it real material, clear rules and a way to check its work, and it becomes genuinely useful.
How I actually use AI
1. Research. Before I write a word, AI goes and reads what real buyers say: reviews, forums, Q&A sites, the places people complain when nobody’s selling to them. For my own market, one research run went through more than 17 million characters of real posts and pulled out the useful quotes word for word, with a link to where each one came from. No person can read that much. AI can, as long as you tell it exactly what to keep and what to throw away.
2. Rules. Every job runs with a strict set of rules. UK spelling. Customer quotes copied exactly, typos and all. No invented numbers, ever. Every claim graded by how strong its source is. If there isn’t a source, it doesn’t go in.
3. The audit. My audit tool runs the same checks on every website, so a score means the same thing whether it’s a plumber in Paignton or a law firm in Leeds.
4. Me. I read everything. I check the sources. I cut what’s wrong, I decide what matters, and I sign it off. AI drafts and researches; I’m responsible for what goes out.
Where AI still falls apart
Even used well, there are things it can’t do:
- It doesn’t know your customers. Not unless you feed it their real words. Left alone, it guesses, and its guesses sound like everyone else’s.
- It fills gaps with confident nonsense. Ask it for a statistic and it’ll often give you one. Whether it’s real is another matter.
- It drifts on long jobs. Without structure, it loses the thread, which is exactly what happened to me for months.
- It can’t take responsibility. If something on your website is wrong, that’s on me, not on a tool.
Should you use AI for your own website copy?
Yes, as a helper, if you follow a few rules:
- Feed it real customer words. Your reviews, your enquiry emails, what people say on the phone. Not just “write my homepage”.
- Ban made-up numbers. Tell it outright: no statistics unless you give it the source.
- Check every fact. Every name, number and claim. Assume it’s wrong until you’ve seen the source.
- Read it out loud. If it could be on any other business’s website, rewrite it.
If you’d rather not do that yourself, that’s what I do. The Conversion Blueprint is AI research and my writing, checked and signed off by me, for £129. Or start with the free website audit and see what your site’s doing now.
You can read more about how I work and who I am.
Frequently asked questions
Is AI copywriting good enough on its own?
In my experience, no. Default AI copy tends to sound generic and can include things that simply aren’t true. It’s a useful tool for research and first drafts, but someone who knows what they’re doing needs to direct it and check every word.
Will Google penalise AI-written content?
Google has said it rewards helpful, reliable content however it’s produced, and that using AI mainly to manipulate search rankings goes against its spam policies. What matters is whether the content is genuinely useful and accurate, not whether a tool helped write it.
Do you use AI in the free audit?
Yes. The free audit is automated, which is how it can score your site in about ten minutes. It runs the same checks on every site, so your score means the same as everyone else’s.
Can AI write my whole website?
It can produce words for every page. Whether those words sound like you, speak to your customers and are actually true is a different question. That part still needs a person.
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