Every other week a client asks me the same question: "Can't I just use ChatGPT to write my website?"
Short answer — sort of. Longer answer — it depends entirely on what you're using it for, and most people get it wrong.
AI writing tools are genuinely useful. I use them myself. But there's a massive difference between using AI as a tool and letting it write your website for you. Get that line wrong and you end up with a site that sounds like everyone else's, ranks poorly, and converts nobody.
What Google Actually Says
Let's clear this up first because there's a lot of misinformation floating around.
Google does not automatically penalise AI-generated content. They've said this explicitly. What they penalise is unhelpful content — regardless of how it was produced. Their spam policies target content created "primarily to manipulate search rankings rather than to help users."
In practice, that means a well-edited, genuinely useful page that started as an AI draft is fine. A hundred pages of barely-touched ChatGPT output designed to capture search traffic? That'll get you hammered.
The March 2024 core update specifically targeted sites doing the latter. Some lost 80-90% of their organic traffic overnight. These weren't small sites either — some had thousands of AI-generated pages.
The line is clearer than people think: is this content actually useful to someone, or does it just exist to rank?
Where AI Content Actually Works
There are parts of a website where AI tools genuinely save time without hurting quality.
Meta descriptions and title tags. Writing 30 variations of a meta description is tedious. AI handles this well. You still need to review them, but it cuts the work in half.
Product descriptions at scale. If you've got 200 products on a WooCommerce store and need descriptions for each, AI gives you a solid starting point. Edit them, add specifics about your products, but the first draft saves hours.
Rephrasing and tone adjustments. Got a technical document that needs simplifying for customers? AI's decent at translating jargon into plain English.
Internal content nobody sees. Staff documentation, process notes, template emails. Nobody's ranking this, nobody's reading it twice. Use AI, save time, move on.
Brainstorming and outlines. This is probably where I use it most. Structuring a page, generating heading ideas, spotting angles I hadn't considered. The thinking tool, not the writing tool.
Where It Backfires
And here's where most small businesses get into trouble.
Your homepage and service pages. These are the pages that need to sound like you. Your voice, your experience, your personality. When a potential customer lands on your site, they're deciding whether they trust you. If your homepage reads like it could belong to any business in any city, you've already lost them.
I can spot AI-written service pages within seconds now — and so can your customers. The phrasing is too smooth, too generic, too eager to please. "We pride ourselves on delivering exceptional solutions tailored to your unique needs." Nobody talks like that. Certainly nobody in Bradford.
Blog posts with no original insight. AI can write a perfectly structured post about "5 Benefits of Having a Website." It'll hit all the right headings, use all the right transitions, sound completely professional. And it'll be identical in substance to ten thousand other AI-generated posts on the same topic.
Google's getting better at recognising this. Not because it detects AI specifically, but because the content adds nothing new. No original experience, no unique perspective, no reason to exist.
Anything requiring local knowledge. AI doesn't know that the new development off Thornton Road has changed parking for every business on that street. It doesn't know that Bradford Council's planning rules are a nightmare for signage. It doesn't know what it's actually like to run a business in BD1 versus BD18. Your customers do, and they can tell when content doesn't.
Your About page. Of all the pages on your site, this one needs to be the most human. If you can't be bothered to write your own story, why would someone trust you with their project?
The E-E-A-T Problem
Google's ranking system increasingly values what they call E-E-A-T — Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness. That first E, Experience, is the one that kills AI content.
A roofer writing "I've been working on houses across Bradford for 20 years and the one thing I see over and over is..." carries weight that no AI can replicate. That's a real person with real experience making a real observation. Google's systems are built to recognise and reward exactly that.
AI has no experience. It can mimic the structure of experienced writing, but the substance isn't there. And as Google's algorithms get more sophisticated — which they are, rapidly — the gap between content with genuine experience and content pretending to have it gets easier to detect.
The Practical Approach
Use AI as a starting point, not the finished product. Here's roughly how I'd approach it for a small business site:
First draft: Let AI handle structure and basic copy for product descriptions, FAQs, and supplementary pages.
Service pages and homepage: Write these yourself or have someone who knows your business write them. Use AI to tidy up grammar or suggest improvements, but the words should be yours.
Blog posts: Use AI for outlines and research, but write from your own experience. The posts that rank and convert are the ones where someone shares something they actually know — not a summary of what's already online.
Always edit. Read everything out loud. If it doesn't sound like something you'd actually say to a customer, rewrite it. Your website should sound like you on a good day, not like a corporate brochure.
The Bottom Line
AI content tools aren't good or bad. They're tools. A drill doesn't build a house — the builder does.
The businesses getting hurt are the ones treating AI like a shortcut to fill pages. The ones doing well are using it to work faster while keeping their own voice and expertise front and centre.
If your website could belong to any business in your industry with a quick find-and-replace of the company name, you've got a problem. That was true before AI, and it's even more true now.
Write like a human. Use AI to help. Don't let it replace the thing that makes customers choose you over the next result.
