The place people stall longest when building a site is usually not the design — it is the words. Asked to describe the business in one sentence, most owners freeze. AI genuinely helps here. It helps within a defined range, though, and pushing past that range costs more time in rewrites than it saved in drafting.
Structure and phrasing are where it is strong
Three things AI does reliably well: arranging structure (what belongs on this page, in what order), tightening sentences (the same meaning, shorter and clearer), and producing several alternative phrasings of the same point.
What those share is that they only work when the raw material already exists. Tell it what you sell, who for, and at what price, and it will lay that out as a page and write it into sentences. Ask it to “write an about page for my company” with nothing else, and you get sentences that would suit any company — which means they describe none.
What it cannot supply
Be most careful with numbers. AI produces contextually plausible figures very fluently, and the resulting sentence reads well. If “98% customer satisfaction” appears in your draft and nobody ever measured it, that is no longer a copywriting problem — it is a credibility problem. Keep unmeasured numbers out from the draft stage onwards.
The actual order — gather material first
Rough notes do not need to be finished sentences. What you do, who it is for, how you differ from the alternative, what it costs and what it covers, and one or two things that actually happened — scribbled down, that is enough. The better these notes, the better the draft; without them, no amount of re-prompting improves anything.
Fact checking means reading the draft line by line and asking “can I verify this?”. Anything you cannot verify gets deleted or rewritten into something you can. “Industry-leading speed” is unverifiable; “we measure speed before and after and give you both figures” is not.
Your voice is the last and shortest stage. AI drafts are usually smooth and characterless. Restoring two or three phrases you actually use when explaining the work to a customer changes the impression of the whole document.
Three common mistakes
First, generating a whole page in one go. Section by section, the weak spots are visible; all at once, it becomes hard to tell which lines are yours and which were invented.
Second, publishing the draft as it stands. We publish AI-assisted articles ourselves, but always through a review gate: are the categories set, do the internal links actually resolve, are there any unverified figures left. Whether that gate exists is what separates good AI-assisted content from the rest.
Third, treating translation as just another draft. Moving copy into another language requires its own judgement, and that deserves a separate discussion.
There is more on using AI in content work in the AI archive, and deciding which page each piece of copy belongs on is covered in the launching on your own series. If you would rather have the site’s performance and search visibility sorted as one job, see our optimization program.