How do I use AI to write my website copy without it sounding generic?
The short answer
Use it for structure and first drafts, then replace every sentence that could appear unchanged on a competitor's site. Generated copy is fluent and general by default, and general is exactly what fails — both for readers and for search. The specifics only you know are the part that cannot be generated, and they are the part that does the work.
On this page
What it is genuinely good at
Structure. It knows what sections a page needs and will not forget one. Left alone, most people forget the opening hours.
Getting past the empty page. Correcting a paragraph is far easier than writing one from nothing, and this is most of the value.
Variations. Ten versions of a headline in seconds, so you can react rather than invent.
Consistency of tone across pages, which is otherwise laborious.
Why the output sounds generic
Because it is trained to produce the most probable sentence, and the most probable sentence about a restaurant is true of every restaurant.
"We serve fresh, locally sourced ingredients in a warm and welcoming atmosphere" is grammatical, pleasant and completely inert. Nobody searches for it. Nobody chooses you because of it. It could be lifted onto four hundred other sites without editing.
That is the failure mode, and it is not a prompt problem. The model cannot know that your grandmother's recipe is why people drive forty minutes, because nobody told it.
The editing pass that fixes it
Work through the draft with one test: could this sentence appear unchanged on a competitor's site?
If yes, it is doing nothing. Replace it with something only you could say:
- Not "quality ingredients" — the supplier's name and why you chose them
- Not "experienced team" — how long, and what they did before
- Not "wide range of services" — the three you are actually known for
- Not "we care about our customers" — the specific thing you do that others do not
This usually cuts the word count substantially, which is the right direction. Generated copy is verbose because volume is cheap to produce; specificity is short.
The things it will get wrong
Check these before publishing, every time:
Facts it invented. Prices, hours, years in business, awards. A model will produce plausible numbers because plausible is what it optimises for, and plausible does not look wrong until a customer arrives expecting it.
Claims you cannot support. "Best in the city", "award-winning", "guaranteed". Some of these are also regulated, particularly in healthcare and financial services.
Things you do not offer. Generated service lists routinely include the standard offering for your industry rather than yours.
The wrong location. It will assume a region and write for it.
The prompt that helps most
Not a clever formula — just supplying what it cannot know:
Write the about page for a family-run Lebanese restaurant in [area], open since [year]. We are known for [dish]. Most customers come for [occasion]. We do not do [thing people assume we do]. Plain language, no marketing adjectives, under 200 words.
The specifics in that brief are the entire difference. Without them you get the average of every restaurant on the internet, which is precisely what you are trying not to be.
Where AI should not write
Your prices and hours. Facts, not prose. Enter them yourself.
Anything regulated. Healthcare claims, financial advice, legal statements.
The one paragraph that explains why you exist. If any part of your site should be entirely yours, it is that one — and readers can tell.
The honest summary
Generate the structure. Supply the substance. The draft gets you to something serviceable in minutes, and the twenty minutes of editing afterwards is what makes it yours rather than anyone's.
The part that decides whether any of this sticks
There is a practical failure mode here that has nothing to do with the writing. You generate the draft, you do the twenty-minute editing pass, the copy is genuinely good — and then it sits in a document for five weeks, because putting it on the site means emailing someone.
Copy is not finished when it is written. It is finished when it is live, and the gap between those two is where most of this effort quietly goes. The editing pass above is best done at the keyboard where the text actually lives, so improving a paragraph is a two-minute act rather than a small project with a lead time.
That is what a dashboard is for, and it is why Helm puts the text of every page — along with the SEO title and description behind it — in one you control. Not because editing is a feature, but because content that can only be changed by someone else stops being changed at all.