If you're already using AI on your website (or thinking about it), here's how to do it without ending up with a site that sounds like everyone else's.
The don’ts
Don’t let AI write your voice for you.
Your voice is the one thing on your website that can’t be copied. The way you talk to your clients, the take you have on your industry, the reason people pick you over the competitor down the road. None of that is sitting in ChatGPT’s training data. Let it write your About page or your services page with no human in the loop, and you’ll end up with something polite, professional, and completely forgettable.
Don’t publish anything you haven’t experienced or don’t understand.
I see this one a lot. A business owner asks AI to write a blog post about their thing, it comes back with confident-sounding advice, they hit publish. Three months later they’ve got a website full of content they can’t back up in conversation. If a client asks you to expand on a point in your blog and you can’t, that’s worse than not having the blog at all.
Don’t chase trends.
AI produces the average of everything that’s already been written. Which means it’ll happily generate copy that’s six months behind whatever is actually working right now. Trend-jumping has always been a slow way to build a business. AI just makes it faster to do badly.
Don’t use AI to fake expertise you don’t have.
If you’re a bookkeeper, AI cannot make you sound like a tax lawyer. It can only make you sound like a tax lawyer until someone reads closely and realises the words don’t quite mean anything. Your real expertise is more interesting than the generic version of it anyway. Use AI to help you say what you know. Not to invent things you don’t.
AI can't replicate your lived experience, the wins, the challenges, the real client experiences. Don't let AI flatten the genuine value that you bring. You aren't generic, you're unique - don't lose that for the sake of saving a few minutes of AI efficiency.
The do’s
Do use AI to get unstuck.
The blank page is the enemy. AI is good at giving you something to react to. Ask it for ten headline options and pick the one you almost like, then rewrite it in your own words. Get it to summarise your messy notes into a rough structure. Ask it what questions a first-time client might have. All real uses, none of which hand over the steering wheel.
Do bring your own point of view to everything you publish.
Read every line back and ask yourself: would I actually say this? Do I believe this? If the answer is no, change it. The most valuable thing on your website is what you think, not what the internet collectively thinks. The boring middle is where AI lives by default. Your job is to drag your copy out of it.
Do think long term.
Your website isn’t a content sprint. It’s the home base of your business. The pages that bring in clients five years from now will be the ones written by someone with actual experience, not the ones that hit a content quota.
Do let your experience drive the strategy.
This is the bit AI absolutely cannot do. Your business has a strategy. That strategy is shaped by your experience, your values, the clients you want, and the ones you don’t. Every word on your website should sit inside it. AI can help with the words. The strategy is yours.
A note on AI search
You’ve probably noticed people aren’t just Googling anymore. They’re asking ChatGPT and Perplexity. They’re reading Google’s AI summaries instead of clicking through. Which means your website has two audiences now: humans, and the AI models pulling from your site to answer humans’ questions.
The content that wins with AI search is the same content that wins with humans. Specific, original, written by someone who actually knows what they’re talking about. Generic AI copy gets ignored. Content with a real point of view gets quoted.
So yes. Use AI. Use it to draft, to get unstuck, to organise your thinking. But don’t use it to skip the part where you sound like yourself. The businesses that win online over the next five years won’t be the ones that produced the most AI content. They’ll be the ones that sound the most like themselves.