Should You Use AI to Write Your Website Copy?

Should you use AI to write your website copy, or hire a copywriter? Founders ask us this all the time now, usually with a copywriter quote sitting next to the design quote. Our answer is that AI can do most of the heavy lifting, as long as you know who you are talking to and what you want to say. The bigger risks sit elsewhere, in sounding like everyone else and in letting AI shape your design. Here is how we approach it.

Does Google penalize AI-written copy?

Search engines rank pages on how useful they are and how clearly they answer what people are searching for, whoever wrote them. So the real question is whether your copy says what you mean, to the people you are trying to reach. Copy that is generic, vague or stuffed with keywords performs badly no matter who wrote it.

When AI copy is enough

• You know your audience. You can describe your buyer, their problem and why they choose you.
• You know your message. Your positioning is settled, even if the wording is rough.
• You have source material. Sales calls, decks and past proposals give the model something real to work from.

In that situation, AI turns your thinking into clean drafts quickly. We then design with that copy, workshop it on the actual page and tune the structure and calls to action for conversion.

When to bring in a copywriter

• Your positioning is unclear. If you cannot explain why buyers pick you, a good copywriter’s real value is helping you work that out.
• The drafts clearly are not landing. After seeing the copy on the page, it still sounds flat or interchangeable.
• Your brand depends on voice. Some categories win on a distinctive tone that takes a specialist to develop.

A copywriter costs extra and needs time to learn your voice, so we suggest designing with the copy you have first and bringing one in only if it clearly fails. Letting finished copy dictate the layout also tends to compromise the design.

Where AI falls short: design

AI-generated websites are easy to spot. They follow the same cookie-cutter structure, and image and design models drift toward whatever look they were trained on. Prompting for design ideas tends to produce the same few aesthetics on repeat.

A better starting point is to collect around ten real websites you like. That gives a designer a clear sense of your taste to build a distinct direction from. Once your brand and design system exist, AI tools become far more useful, because they have a source of truth to stay on brand with.