How to make AI writing sound human: my method for website copy

AI writing sounds generic when it starts from nothing. Ask for “a home page for a removals firm” and you get the most likely home page for any removals firm: polite and interchangeable. To make AI writing sound human, change what goes in before you fix what comes out, then edit the draft hard.

This is how I write my clients’ website copy, and since AI arrived, my delivery times have shrunk. Once the visual identity and the page layouts are approved, I do the SEO research and the copywriting, then mix everything together with AI, drafting and editing in rounds until I am happy with the copy and the site. Only then does the client see it.

Below is that method in six steps, with a prompt to adapt and a list of patterns to cut. It is part of my guide to AI for small businesses and fits into my web design process.

Why AI copy sounds generic

A language model writes the most likely next words. With no facts about your business, the most likely page is the average of thousands of similar pages: the same promises and adjectives, in the same reassuring rhythm. Nothing in it is wrong, and nothing in it is yours.

I want my clients to look good, and their prospects to be a little intimidated by the website, so that the business is taken seriously. It also cuts down on negotiation: a prospect who thinks you are not that respectable will not think you are worth that price. Copy that could belong to anyone works against both.

The other risk is invented facts: a model short of information fills the gap with something plausible, such as a guarantee nobody gave. In my work, some assistants do it more often than others, which is why I write with Claude (my Claude vs ChatGPT comparison has the details). None is immune, and the method below makes invented details easier to catch.

How to make AI writing sound human: the six steps at a glance

Step 1: give the AI material only your business has

Most of the work happens before the first prompt: the aim is raw material that no competitor could have written.

• The brief. I start every website by asking about the company, what it offers and which clients it prefers working with. The answers go into the prompt as plain facts, with the action the page should lead to, such as a call or a quote request.
• Proof. The areas you cover, how quickly you answer, what your guarantee includes. One detail a prospect can check does more than three adjectives.
• Your customers’ words. I use deep research to find what people complain about most in a niche. Those complaints give the copy its angle, and the way customers phrase them makes the best headlines. My method is in how to use Deep Research for copywriting and SEO.
• The owner’s way of talking. How the owner explains the job on the phone is the voice the site should have. A two-minute voice note, transcribed, can hold better sentences than a first draft.

Take an example, a removals firm in Leeds. Its material could look like this:

Business: removals firm in Leeds, homes and small offices
Area: Leeds and West Yorkshire
Facts: free survey before every quote; fixed price after the survey;
most house moves done in one day; one phone number for any claim
Preferred clients: families moving house, landlords between tenants
Complaints found in reviews: movers arriving late, a price that grows
on the day, breakages nobody takes responsibility for
Action: call, or book a free survey

Step 2: show it your voice with three to five examples

Asking for “friendly but professional” gets you everybody’s idea of friendly but professional. Examples work better: Anthropic’s prompting guide calls them one of the most reliable ways to steer tone and structure. It recommends three to five, relevant to the task, varied enough that the model does not copy a single pattern, and wrapped in <example> tags so the model can tell them apart from your instructions.

The best examples come from the business itself:

• an email the owner sent a customer, one that got a good reply;
• the owner’s answer to a question customers often ask, transcribed;
• a quote that explains the job clearly;
• failing that, a paragraph you write yourself in the voice you want.

Step 3: brief the AI like a new colleague

Anthropic’s guide suggests treating the model as a brilliant but new employee who lacks context on your norms: if a colleague who knows little about the task would be confused by your prompt, the model will be too. Three habits from that guide change the result on copy:

1. Give it a role. One sentence is enough: what it writes, and for whom.
2. Explain why. “Three sentences at most” is a rule. Adding “because visitors decide in the first lines whether to read on” lets the model apply the reason to cases you did not foresee.
3. Say what to do, not what to avoid. Instead of “don’t sound like a robot”, describe the voice: “short sentences, concrete facts, ‘we’ and ‘you’, the way the owner talks on the phone”. Write the prompt itself in plain prose too: Anthropic notes that a prompt’s formatting can carry over into the answer, so a prompt full of bullet points tends to get bullet points back.

Here is a prompt for the removals firm, built on those habits:

You are the copywriter for a removals firm in Leeds. You write for
people about to move house who worry about the price, the timing
and their belongings.

<brief>
[the material from step 1]
</brief>

<examples>
<example>[an email the owner sent a customer]</example>
<example>[the owner's answer to a common question, transcribed]</example>
<example>[a paragraph from a quote that explains the job]</example>
</examples>

Write the opening section of the home page: a headline, then three
sentences at most, because visitors decide in the first lines whether
to read on. Answer the most frequent complaint in the brief with a
fact from the brief, in the voice of the examples. Use only the facts
in the brief; where one is missing, write [TO CONFIRM] so I can check
it. Give me three versions of the headline.

Keep the brief, the examples and the voice rules in a Project in Claude (ChatGPT has projects too). Project instructions apply only to the chats inside that project, so each client keeps its own voice. The Instructions for Claude field in Settings is the wrong place for one client’s voice, because it applies to all your conversations (Anthropic’s help page).

Step 4: draft one section at a time, then refine in rounds

A whole page requested in one go comes back as a whole page of averages. Ask for one section at a time, with several versions of the lines that matter most: the headline, the sentence under it and the call to action. Choosing between three headlines is faster than fixing one.

Then refine in rounds, telling the model what works and why: “Version 2 is right, but ‘hassle-free’ could be any firm: use the fixed price instead.”

One last round before your own edit: ask the model to “quote every sentence that would still work for a competitor, and every claim that is not in the brief”. It catches some; step 5 catches the rest.

Step 5: edit hard and cut what sounds generated

Editing is where the copy starts to sound like a person. Read the draft aloud: wherever you run out of breath, or would never say the sentence to a customer, rewrite it. Then go through these patterns:

Here is the removals firm’s opening, before and after:

Before (no brief, no examples, no edit):
Moving home is one of the most stressful experiences in life. Our
dedicated team of professionals is committed to delivering a
first-class service tailored to your needs.

After (brief, examples, edit):
House removals in Leeds: most homes moved in one day.
We survey your home for free before we quote, and the price we
quote is the price you pay on the day. If anything gets damaged,
one phone number deals with your claim.

Short and sharp works. It is my rule for cold emails: the first email is three lines at most, an introduction and a call to action, because people hate receiving long emails they never asked for from people they do not know. A visitor on a service page did not ask for your life story either: give them the offer, the proof and the next step first, and the details further down. The same goes for a press pitch: I am no PR specialist and barely tried, yet I got a personal trainer friend featured in the French magazine Match, and I credit the copywriting and targeting skills that cold emailing gave me.

Step 6: check every fact, then show the client

A sentence can sound perfectly human and still be false. Before anything goes live, check every number, price, area, opening hour, guarantee and name against the brief or with the client.

Google now says the same. In October 2026 it updated its guidance on generative AI content to call it “critical” to fact-check and review AI-generated content by hand before publishing. Its advice on accuracy covers the metadata too: page titles, meta descriptions and image alt text.

Then I present the site to the client and make changes based on what they say. The client is the last fact-checker: only they know whether the business really answers the phone on Saturdays.

Humanisers, detectors and Google: what actually counts

Look up this subject and you will find “AI humaniser” tools, which rewrite AI text so that detectors score it as human-written. That solves the wrong problem.

• Detectors are a poor referee. OpenAI withdrew its own AI text classifier in July 2023 because of its low rate of accuracy. In OpenAI’s tests at launch, it correctly identified 26% of AI-written texts and wrongly labelled 9% of human-written ones as AI-written.
• Google judges the page, not the tool. AI-assisted content must meet the same rules as any other, and generating many pages with AI without adding value for users can break Google’s spam policy on scaled content abuse.
• Your prospects are the test that pays. Nobody runs a service page through a detector before calling. A humaniser can swap words; it cannot add your area, your guarantee or the way you talk to customers.

The same habits make a page worth quoting for ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity: clear answers and facts nobody else has. That side is covered in how to write content that AI assistants actually quote.

Before you publish: my checklist, and when to hand it over

1. The brief holds the offer, the area, the preferred clients, the proof, the action the page leads to and your customers’ words, checked against their sources.
2. Three to five examples of the voice sit in <example> tags, with personal data removed.
3. The prompt gives a role and the reason behind each rule, written as what to do.
4. Each section was drafted on its own, with several versions of the key lines.
5. The draft was read aloud, passed the swap test and lost the patterns in the table above.
6. Every fact is checked, no [TO CONFIRM] is left, and the client has approved the page.

The same method works for blog articles, and my guide on how to write SEO blog posts adds what is specific to them. If you would rather spend that time on your business, the research, the writing and the editing are part of my website projects.