AI websites without going generic
AI makes websites faster and cheaper. It also makes them interchangeable, unless you know exactly where humans stay in charge.
Derk Gähler
The question we get most often is whether you will end up with one of those generic AI sites. It is a fair question. A language model can produce a complete website in an afternoon that looks polished and says nothing at all.
Where AI genuinely saves time
AI is excellent at the boring half of the work: competitor research that would otherwise take two days, first drafts of copy, variations on a headline, and the writing of alt text, metadata, schema markup and translations.
That's not a small win. It saves weeks of lead time, and those weeks translate directly into a lower price for the client. Nothing wrong with that.
Where it goes wrong
AI is trained on what already exists. Ask for a service page and you get the average of a thousand service pages: fluently written, entirely interchangeable. 'We take care of everything for you.' 'Quality comes first.'
The problem isn't the language quality. The problem is that there's no choice in it. Strong positioning takes sharp choices. Try to appeal to everyone and what's left is mostly mediocrity.
Strong positioning takes sharp choices. Try to appeal to everyone and what is left is mostly mediocrity.
What stays human work
Four parts stay in our own hands. The first is positioning, which answers why someone picks you over the runner-up. The second is the structure of the site, because that follows from the questions your customers ask and not from a template.
The third is final editing. Every sentence a language model writes passes someone who knows your market. The fourth is quality control on technology, accessibility and speed. Those are exactly the parts a generator skips, because they are not visible.
A simple test
There is a quick way to check whether a text is really about your company. Take the copy from your homepage, replace your company name with your biggest competitor’s and read it again. If nothing jars, then nothing in it applies to you alone.
The check takes half a minute and exposes more than an average editing round. What survives the swap is precisely the part a visitor could just as easily have read somewhere else.
In short
- AI speeds up research, production and variants. That saves real money.
- Positioning and structure are choices. Appealing to everyone is not one.
- Every piece of copy passes someone who knows the market.
- The competitor test: if your copy could run unchanged on a competitor's site, it says nothing distinctive.
Written by
Derk Gähler
Co-founder & Digital Expert
Connects positioning, web development and online marketing into one clear digital product that is beautiful, functional and easy to use.
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