AI vs a copywriter what can be better for website content?
When ChatGPT first appeared, most of what got written about it in marketing circles fell into one of two camps: it’ll replace copywriters entirely, or real writers will always beat a robot.
A few years on, neither take held up.
AI got dramatically better at producing fluent, readable copy. Fluency was never really the differentiator that mattered. The actual gap left over is bigger than most business owners expect and it’s not where the 2023 debate said it would be.
Fluency stopped being the argument
Early AI-generated copy was genuinely easy to spot;
- Repetitive structure.
- Generic phrasing.
- A certain flatness to it.
- Blocks of paragraphs that had lots of words but didn’t really say anything or get to the point.
- Flowery, positive language that very few of us would use in real life.
If used correctly, a lot of that can be eradicated.
Ask a current AI model for website copy today and sentence by sentence, it will read as competently as most professionally written content.
If your test for “should I use AI” is “does it sound robotic,” you’re applying a test that stopped being useful.
So I ran the same exercise I used to run for clients when this debate first started, but redone properly.
I ran the same test three ways
The scenario: a small novated leasing brokerage needed an About page. Here’s what happened at each stage.
1. What the business provided, a rough draft the owner had written themselves:
- “We’ve Got You Covered. Our team at [Business Name] have extensive experience in the financial services industry and will provide to you a quality of personal service that is hard to find in these days of email and voice mail. We want you to know we are in the business of helping employees ‘save money’ where they can, we are not in the business of ‘selling cars’.”
Reasonable intent, some grammatical rough edges, no clear structure, and nothing a reader would remember five minutes later.
2. What AI produces from that alone, fed nothing but the draft above and asked to “improve and professionalise this About page,” a current AI model gives you something like this;
- “Welcome to [Business Name], where we make novated leasing simple, transparent and genuinely beneficial for you. Our experienced team is dedicated to helping employees maximise their savings through smart, tax-effective vehicle leasing solutions. We pride ourselves on offering personalised guidance every step of the way, from choosing the right vehicle to understanding your lease terms. With access to Australia’s leading novated leasing providers, we ensure you get competitive rates and outstanding ongoing support. At [Business Name], your financial wellbeing is our priority, and we’re here to help you drive away with confidence.”
Notice that this is grammatically clean, well structured, and perfectly readable. It’s also completely interchangeable with the About page of any other novated leasing business in the country. It doesn’t mention a founder, a specific principle the business operates by, or a single fact that couldn’t be swapped into a competitor’s site with a find-and-replace on the business name.
3. What changes when someone actually extracts the real story. Before writing anything, this means sitting down with the business and asking real questions: who founded it and why, what specific principles they actually operate by, what makes their process different, what a client would say if you asked them directly. That interview turns into something like this, from the original comparison professional copywriter Jackie McRae and I put together and both shared publicly to make exactly this point:
[Business Name] – Proudly Driving Tax Savings for SMEs
About Us
Welcome to [Business Name], Australia’s first novated leasing brokerage for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and their employees.
We’re proud of our commitment to drive tax savings for small businesses and the individuals they employ. There’s no greater feeling than helping clients connect with a fully maintained novated lease which provides an ATO-endorsed, tax-effective way for employees to get a great car to drive around in and put more money back into their bank account.
Under the direction of [Founder’s Name], former Financial Planner with over three decades’ experience, [Business Name] was founded on three respected principles that underpin financial planning services:
- Fiduciary Duty – we act in the best interest of our clients and put their needs above all else. This includes full transparency, no hidden fees, and brokering the most appropriate solution for each client’s unique needs
- Education – we believe knowledge is power and have created a number of resources to educate Australians on novated leasing so that they can make informed decisions
- Integrity – we adhere to high ethical standards and act with integrity, from the hands-on support we provide employers and payroll teams to our advice around lease terms and exit strategies and our ongoing customer service.
How We Work
Our goal is to provide our clients with a stress-free and seamless novated lease experience, ensuring that they can get on with enjoying their new vehicle without having to worry about the financial details.
Every novated lease we help establish takes a tailored approach to our clients’ unique circumstances. We are dedicated to providing independent advice and support every step of the way, from helping small businesses attract and retain staff by setting novated leasing up through their payroll, to assisting employees with tax saving vehicle options, budgeting anticipated car expenses, and providing the most suitable novated lease options.
Our exclusive relationships with some of the largest novated leasing companies in Australia (who largely focus on big business and multinationals) means small business owners and their employees now have access to tax savings they otherwise would not have been able to take advantage of.
When you partner with us, you’ll see our client-focused approach extends beyond the lease setup. We’re here to provide ongoing support and advice, help our clients manage their novated lease and ensure you get the most out of your vehicle.
Our team is always on hand to answer any questions and provide support whenever it is needed. If you have a question, we have the answer! We’d love to hear from you.
The difference between version two and version three has nothing to do with which one was typed by a person versus a model. Version three is fluent too. The difference is entirely about input: a named founder, three specific stated principles, a genuine point of difference (access usually reserved for big business) and language a competitor couldn’t credibly copy-paste.
Version two didn’t fail because AI wrote it. It failed because it was never given anything specific to work with, and that’s the trap a lot of agencies, contractors and web developers fall into: feed a client’s business into AI with a thin brief, get back something fluent and professional-looking, and treat that as the finished job. It reads fine. It ships fast. It’s also functionally the same paragraph every other business in the category is getting from their own agency running the exact same shortcut.
That’s a real problem for three separate things, not just one.
- For E-E-A-T, because Google’s own quality guidelines are explicit that experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust have to be demonstrated, and generic content demonstrates none of it.
- For AI citations, because when ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google’s AI Overviews are deciding which business to actually name and recommend, they’re pattern-matching for something specific enough to be worth citing, not another paragraph indistinguishable from a hundred competitors saying the same thing.
- For organic search, because ranking has always come down to relative quality within a category. If everyone in that category is publishing the same generic AI output, nobody in it stands out enough to win.
The extra time it takes to do this properly, or the cost of bringing in a copywriter who’ll actually ask the right questions first, isn’t really being spent on better sentences. It’s being spent on the only thing that makes a business’s content worth finding, citing or ranking in the first place: making it unmistakably about that specific business, not a template with the name swapped out.
Why this matters more for search visibility than writing quality does
Google has been explicit that it doesn’t care how content was produced, by a person, by AI, or some mix of both. What it does care about is whether the content demonstrates genuine first-hand experience and says something a generic competitor couldn’t.
That’s a direct problem for version two above: if every business in a category feeds AI the same thin brief, you get near-identical About pages across the entire category, and Google’s own guidance is explicit that content indistinguishable from a dozen competitors has nothing to earn a ranking with.
The risk isn’t “AI-written content gets penalised.” It’s that generic input produces generic output regardless of who or what does the writing, and generic content was always going to struggle, with or without AI in the loop.
What I actually do with AI now
I don’t tell clients to avoid it and I use it myself.
What I won’t do is generate content straight from a thin brief and publish it.
The actual work, the part that was always the real value in hiring someone for this, is the interview: figuring out what’s genuinely specific about a business before a single word gets written or generated.
Once that groundwork exists, whether the final draft comes from a person typing it or AI producing a first pass that gets edited against real input, matters far less than most people assume.
If you’re deciding whether to write your own website content, generate it, or bring someone in, get in touch and I’ll help you work out what your business actually has to say that a generic brief would miss.
