It produces a competent generic page in seconds. What it cannot produce is anything only your business could say, which is the part that does the work.

The experiment everybody runs

Ask it to write a page about your main service and it produces one, immediately, in reasonable prose.

The structure is sensible, the grammar is correct, and it reads more smoothly than a great deal of what businesses publish.

Which is genuinely impressive and is why the first reaction is usually that the problem of writing has been solved.

Reading it a second time, more slowly, is where the useful information is.

What the output contains

The last two are the ones that matter. Everything that makes a page persuasive, which is the specifics and the honesty about what you do not do, is absent, because none of it was available to the tool.

Try the comparison

The exercise that makes this concrete in five minutes.

Ask it to write your page. Then ask it to write the same page for a competitor, using their business name.

The two outputs will be substantially the same, because the only input that differed was a name.

That is the whole problem in one demonstration: the page it produced for you is the page it will produce for everybody in your trade.

Which is the exact pattern the search engines spent this year explicitly identifying and discounting.

Publishing it puts you into the category that was named in August rather than out of it.

A worked example

A business asked it for a page about a specialist repair they had done for years.

It produced nine hundred words describing the repair correctly in general terms.

It contained no price, no duration, no mention of the fault that causes most of these jobs, and no acknowledgement that the repair is sometimes not worth doing.

All four of those were things the owner knew and none of them was in the output, because none of them was in the question.

He rewrote it, keeping the structure and replacing most of the content, and the result took forty minutes rather than the two hours it would otherwise have taken.

The saving was real and it was in the structure rather than in the words.

What it can honestly be used for here

Since the answer is not nothing.

An outline, which is faster than staring at an empty page and easy to rearrange.

A list of questions somebody might have, which is a reasonable prompt for your own answers.

Rewriting something you have already written, to shorten it or change the tone.

And producing several openings to react to, since choosing between options is easier than starting.

All of those treat it as something to react to rather than something to publish, which is the distinction that keeps it useful.

The prompt does not fix it

Worth addressing, because the standard advice this week is that better prompting produces better output.

Better prompting does produce better output, and it cannot supply information the tool does not have.

You can tell it your prices, your area, your typical job, and your exceptions, and it will incorporate them well.

At which point you have supplied every fact that makes the page worth reading and it has arranged them, which is a real service and a different one from writing the page.

The work moved rather than disappeared, and the part that moved was the easier part.

The obvious trap

Which is the reason to be clear about this now.

Generating twenty pages in an afternoon is possible and will be sold as a service within weeks.

A site with twenty generated pages is a site with twenty pages that could have come from anywhere, published at the moment the industry started actively looking for exactly that.

It is the town pages problem in a faster form, and it will end the same way.

If somebody offers you volume content cheaply in the new year, that is the question to ask about where it came from.

Check anything you keep

Practical, if you do use the output.

Read every factual claim and verify it, since the errors read exactly like the correct parts.

Remove anything you cannot personally stand behind, which is usually more than expected.

Add the figures, the exceptions, and the case where somebody should not buy, none of which will be there.

Then read it aloud and ask whether it sounds like you, because it will not, and that is fixable in one pass.

Somebody has already used it on your site

Worth checking, since this is spreading faster than any policy about it.

Anybody who writes for you, whether a supplier, a member of staff, or a friend helping out, has had access to this for a week and it is free.

Ask, plainly and without accusation, since the honest answer is useful and the question will not be volunteered.

Then decide what your position is: that it can be used for drafts you rewrite, or for nothing, or something in between.

Say it once now, because a position stated in December is easier than a conversation in March about a page that turned out to contain an invented figure.

The counter-case

Dismissing it entirely would be a mistake.

For somebody who genuinely cannot get started, a competent first draft to react to is worth a great deal and is better than a page that never gets written.

It is also good at the parts nobody enjoys: rephrasing, shortening, and producing variations.

And a business with no content at all is worse off than one with a generic page, whatever the ideal would be.

Use it for structure and options, supply the specifics yourself, and check every claim before publishing anything.

What to do

  1. Ask it for your page.
  2. Ask it for a competitor's.
  3. Compare the two.
  4. Keep the structure, not the content.
  5. Add your figures and exceptions.
  6. Verify every factual claim.
  7. Read it aloud before publishing.

Step three is the demonstration worth doing yourself, since the two pages being nearly identical explains the whole problem better than any argument about it.

Where the specifics have to come from is covered in content written by somebody who was not there.

Frequently asked questions

What does it produce?

A competent generic page in seconds, with sensible structure and correct grammar, reading more smoothly than a great deal of what businesses publish.

What is missing?

Figures you could stand behind, limits and exceptions, and anything a competitor could not publish. All the specifics that make a page persuasive were unavailable to it.

What is the demonstration?

Ask it for your page, then for a competitor's using their name. The outputs are substantially the same, because the only input that differed was a name.

Does better prompting fix it?

It improves the output and cannot supply facts the tool lacks. Once you have told it your prices, area, and exceptions, you have supplied the part that matters and it has arranged them.

What can it honestly be used for?

An outline, a list of questions to answer yourself, rewriting something you already wrote, and producing openings to react to. All treat it as something to react to.

What is the trap?

Generating twenty pages in an afternoon. That is the town pages problem in a faster form, published exactly when the industry started looking for content that could come from anywhere.

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.

Tried asking it to write your service page?

Now ask it to write your competitor's. The two pages explain the problem better than any argument.

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