Skip to content
Free website audit — see why your site loses customers. Get yours
MakeAndUpdate

Journal · The Clarity Series · Content

Should I use AI to write my website?

By Nicholas Cabel The 60-second version lives on Instagram

Yes, as a drafting tool. Google does not ban AI-written content, and it has said so plainly. What it does penalise is content churned out at scale to chase rankings, no matter who or what produced it. So use AI to get a rough draft on the page, then rewrite it with your own facts before anyone reads it.

In plain English

Think of AI like a very fast intern who has never met your customers, never seen your shop, and will confidently make things up rather than admit it. It can hand you a tidy first draft in ten seconds, which saves you the misery of the blank page. But every sentence that is actually specific and true still has to come from you.

Three things to know

01

Google judges the page, not the tool

Its guidance targets low-effort content mass-produced to game rankings, whether a person, a machine, or both wrote it.

02

AI cannot know your specifics

Your town, how you actually do the job, what you tell nervous customers on the phone, the questions you get every week: that has to come out of your head.

03

Be the last editor, always

Read every line out loud before it goes live and delete anything you would never say to a customer standing in front of you.

Worth remembering

Google reported that its March 2024 spam and core updates reduced low-quality, unoriginal content in search results by 45 percent, more than the 40 percent improvement it had originally expected.

That cleanup was aimed at content produced at scale to boost rankings, and Google was explicit that the policy applies whether automation, humans, or a combination made it. If you publish AI text you never edited, you are publishing exactly the kind of page that pass was built to clear out.

What to do about it

I use AI the way I use a calculator: quick on the boring parts, never in charge of the answer. If you want a straight read on whether your pages sound like you or sound like a machine, Get a free website audit.

About the author

  • Nicholas Cabel

    Written by

    Nicholas Cabel

    Founder of MakeAndUpdate, a one-person web studio in West Chester, PA. Hand-codes fast websites for local businesses and builds in public.

    @makeandupdate