The Desk · Writing
Why Your Website Copy Sounds Like Everyone Else's
Open five websites in your field and read the first screen of each. The same words turn up again and again: passionate, tailored, bespoke, elevate, solutions. Swap the logos around and you’d struggle to tell the businesses apart.
I do a lot of website audits and this comes up again and again, every single time. It’s immediately obvious that AI made it.
When every site sounds the same, a client has no way to tell why they should choose you. So they compare what they can see, which is usually the price. Your website copy is often the first conversation someone has with your business, and generic words make it a conversation they forget.
Nobody sets out to sound generic. Every one of those businesses has an owner who cares, a way of working that’s their own and clients who chose them for a reason. But it’s easy to hand over the job of writing your website to AI. Once you can tell what makes good or terrible AI output, you’ll be able to differentiate yourself much better.
Why it happens
We write from the inside
When you write about your own business, you start with what you know best: your services, your process, your qualifications.
But when your client comes in, they’re not thinking about that. They’re wondering whether you’ll understand their situation, whether it’ll be money well spent, and whether you’ll be easy to work with.
Most of the time, when you just tell AI “write a website for my business”, it will write it as a junior writer does: from the inside. Not from your client’s point of view. And because it doesn’t know the psychology of what makes your clients choose you, it reaches for the same abstract words everyone else uses.
We borrow from competitors without meaning to
Before writing, most of us look at what others in our field have done. It’s a reasonable instinct. You want to know what’s expected, and you don’t want to get it wrong.
But the words seep in. You read “tailored solutions” on three sites and it starts to feel like the correct way to say it. Then your site becomes the fourth. When so many sites are written from generic AI these days, there’s not much point in asking your own AI to research and copy them.
AI makes it faster
This is the newest reason, and the one I see most in audits. Ask an AI tool to write a homepage with no brief, and you get the average of every website it has read. That average is exactly the “enthusiastic but empty” voice we’re trying to get away from.
The tools can write well when they have something real to work from. Without a brief, they fill the gaps with the most common words they know.
What has to come before the copy
Beautiful copy is never written from scratch. It comes from knowing who you’re talking to, how you sound and what sets you apart. When those three things are clear, the words come much more easily, and they’re words only your business could use.
That’s what a Brand Messaging Architecture holds. It’s the framework I created for my clients, and it sets out:
- Your ideal client: who they are, what they’re worried about, and the words they use for it.
- Your brand voice: how you sound, with examples of what that looks like on a page.
- A copy bank: phrases to use, and words to avoid.
It’s the first thing I make for every website copy client. Once it exists, it’s what you hand to your designer, your team or your AI tools, so everyone writing for you starts from the same place. And you can see the difference immediately in the quality of the output.
Three questions to start with on your own
You don’t need a full framework to make a start. These three questions will take you a long way towards a better homepage.
1. Who exactly is your client, and what are they worried about?
Write the answer in the words they’d use, not yours. If you have emails or messages from past clients, read them again and note the phrases they use to describe their problem. “I don’t know where to start getting more corporate clients for my bakery business” tells you far more than “seeking strategic guidance”.
2. How do you sound when you explain your work to a friend over coffee?
Record yourself. Use a voice note, or ask a friend to ask you what you do and let it run for a few minutes. Then write down the phrases you used. Most of us are clearer and warmer out loud than on a page, and those spoken phrases are often the beginning of your real voice.
3. What can you say that a competitor couldn’t?
Look for a detail, a method, a story or a standard. It might be how you run a first meeting, a step you never skip, or the reason you started. If a competitor could put your sentence on their site without changing a word, keep looking.
Capturing the nuances
You might think that brand photography in Singapore wouldn’t be that much different in terms of brand voice, but they are. I’ve written for three brand photographers. Before working with me, the reasons they gave for someone who chose them were the same: brand photos that capture you at your best and look good in speaker features. Things like that. After going through three brand photographers, I noticed that each of them has nuances as to what makes them different:
- One of them specialises in perfect composition, so this is the go-to photographer for luxury brands, for designers, for people who care very much about the overall composition and look.
- Another one is excellent at capturing candid shots. Her shots are vibrant. The way she speaks is enthusiastic, warm, and compelling.
- The third one is great at capturing corporate headshots and helping people with their visibility, so her style is very much direct, rugged, and no-nonsense.
This differentiation in nuance wouldn’t have been possible if the three of them had just told AI to write about their brand photography business. It takes a human being to judge the difference between generic platitudes and words that are actually compelling.
One next step
Answer the three questions this week. Then rewrite only your homepage headline with what you find, and leave everything else for now.
One specific headline will show you how different the rest of your site could feel. It’s also a much gentler place to begin than a full rewrite.
If you’d like to build the full groundwork with me, that’s what Brand Messaging Architecture is for. As a professional copywriter and AI builder, I’ll dive into your brand with you and create a Brand Messaging Architecture you can train your AI on, so it actually writes like you.
