I’ve been staring at a lot of AI-generated websites lately. Client sites, competitor sites, random SaaS landing pages I stumble on at 1am when I should be sleeping. And here’s the thing that’s been bugging me:
They all sound the same.
Same hero copy. same “transform your workflow” nonsense. same three icons in a row with a heading, a subheading, and a button that says “Get Started.” I could swap the logo on half these sites, and you’d never notice.
That’s AI convergence. and it’s coming for branding, whether we like it or not.
What’s actually happening
Every AI tool got trained on roughly the same slice of the internet. so when a thousand different businesses ask an AI to “write compelling landing page copy,” they’re all pulling from the same well. the AI isn’t being lazy — it’s just doing what it was trained to do. give it a vague brief, you get a blurry, generic result back. that’s not a bug, that’s just how the tool works.
The problem is on our end. most of us are giving AI a blurry picture and expecting a sharp one back.
I see this constantly with WP Travel Kit. Travel agencies come to me wanting a site that “stands out,” then they fill it with the exact same trust badges and the exact same “book with confidence” language as their competitor down the road. The tools didn’t kill their brand. They just made it really, really easy to skip the hard part.
So what do you actually do about it?
- Feed it your weird stuff, not your generic stuff. don’t ask AI to write “professional contractor copy.” tell it about the actual guy who’s been doing this since 2019, the specific counties he serves, the one thing he complains about on every job. specificity is the opposite of convergence.
- Keep a banned word list. i literally have one for client work now — no “leverage,” no “game-changer,” no “delve.” if a word shows up in every AI output ever, it’s not your brand voice anymore, it’s everyone’s.
- Use AI for the skeleton, not the soul. structure, research, first drafts — great. the actual voice, the specific claims, the thing that makes someone remember you? that still has to come from a real place.
- Say the unverifiable stuff out loud, then go verify it. if you don’t know your exact numbers, don’t let the AI make them up and don’t let yourself skip that check either.
Honestly, I’m guilty of this too. I’ll market the heck out of a client’s business and then completely forget to do the same thing for my own products. WP Travel Kit sits there with generic-ish copy while i’m out here writing custom banned-word lists. funny how that works, right? We’re all better at branding other people than ourselves.
The boring truth
AI convergence isn’t really an AI problem. It’s a laziness problem that AI makes really convenient. The tools aren’t going to develop a personality for you. That part’s still on us — the weird specific details, the actual opinions, the stuff that would sound wrong coming out of anyone else’s mouth.
If your brand could be anyone’s brand right now, that’s worth sitting with for a minute.
till then — back to writing landing pages that (hopefully) don’t sound like everyone else’s.
— Tajim
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