Every business owner staring at a blank "About Us" page has probably wondered whether AI can just write it for them. The honest answer is: it can get you most of the way there, but the last stretch still matters — and skipping it shows.
What AI is genuinely good at
- Breaking through blank-page paralysis. Turning a rough list of services into a structured draft, in seconds, is where AI copy tools shine brightest.
- Consistency across many pages. Keeping tone and formatting consistent across a dozen service pages is tedious for a human and trivial for a tool that can hold the whole style guide in its "head" at once.
- Variations and testing. Generating five different headline options to test against each other takes seconds instead of an afternoon.
Where it tends to fall flat
- Specificity. AI-generated copy defaults to generic phrasing — "quality service," "customer satisfaction," "years of experience" — because it doesn't know the actual story: the founder who started the business out of a garage, the one client who almost walked away and stayed for a decade. Those specifics are what actually build trust.
- Sounding like everyone else. Because these tools are trained on huge volumes of existing web copy, unedited output tends to sound like a composite of every competitor's site — which is the opposite of standing out.
- Facts about your business. Pricing, service areas, certifications, and policies need to be verified by a person who actually knows them. AI tools will confidently write something plausible-sounding that's simply wrong if it isn't given the correct facts.
A workflow that works well: use AI to get a structured first draft fast, then have someone who actually knows the business — you, or a copywriter who's interviewed you — rewrite it with real specifics, a real voice, and a fact-check pass. You get the speed without the generic tone.
A quick test for any draft, AI-written or not
Read the copy and ask: could this sentence be published on a competitor's site with just the business name swapped out? If yes, it needs a specific detail — a number, a story, a named result — that only your business could truthfully claim.
The bottom line
AI is a genuinely useful drafting tool for website copy, not a finishing tool. The businesses that get the most out of it treat the AI draft as a rough sketch and spend their actual effort on the specifics that make the copy unmistakably theirs.