Your agency wrote your website with AI and did not tell you

How to tell if AI wrote your website copy

You do not need to be a writer to spot it. AI-generated copy has a particular shape, and once you see it you cannot unsee it.

• Opening lines like "In today's fast-paced world" or "In the ever-evolving landscape of..."
• Three-item lists everywhere: "professional, reliable, and trustworthy"
• Vague verbs: "leverage", "empower", "deliver", "unlock", "streamline"
• Sentences that sound positive but contain no actual information
• No names. No specific jobs you have done. No real numbers. No mention of your town
• An About page that could belong to a dentist, a plumber, or a financial adviser without changing a word

Read your homepage out loud. If it sounds like a brochure read by an actor who has never met you, that is the tell.

Why generic AI copy hurts your business

The point of website copy is to convince a visitor that you are the right person for the job. Generic text does the opposite. It tells the reader nothing, so they leave.

It also hurts you on Google. Search engines have spent the last two years getting better at recognising AI filler. Pages that say nothing specific get ranked behind pages that do. If your competitor in Bristol or Leeds has a page that mentions the actual streets they work on, the boilers they fit, or the clients they have helped, they will outrank you on local searches.

And it tells your visitor something worse: that you did not care enough to write your own site. The website is often the first thing a customer sees. The AI copy is the equivalent of handing them a flyer with someone else's name crossed out.

What you actually paid for

Check your original quote or contract. Look for the words "copywriting", "content creation", "content writing", or "bespoke content". If any of those are on the invoice, you paid for a human to write your site.

A copywriter, even a cheap one, costs the agency real money. Running a prompt through ChatGPT costs them roughly nothing. The margin on that line item, if they used AI, is close to one hundred percent.

This is not about whether AI is allowed near a website. It is about whether you were told. If the agency billed you for copywriting and quietly used a chatbot, you paid for one thing and received another.

What to do now

First, get the evidence. Save screenshots of the worst pages. Copy a paragraph or two into an AI detector if you want a second opinion, but honestly your own ears are enough. If it sounds like a chatbot, it probably was one.

Then write a short email to the agency. Keep it factual. "I was billed for copywriting on invoice X. The copy on the site reads as AI-generated. Can you confirm how it was produced, and who wrote it?" Do not accuse. Ask. Their answer, or their silence, tells you everything.

If they admit it, ask for the copywriting fee back or for a human to rewrite it at no extra cost. If they refuse, that is a contract dispute and you have the invoice as proof of what was agreed.

Fixing the copy properly

Good website copy is not literary. It is specific. It says what you do, where you do it, who you do it for, and why someone should pick you over the next result on Google.

You do not need a copywriter to start. Sit down for an hour with a notepad and answer these out loud:

• What did the last five customers actually ask you to do?
• What do they say when they ring up worried?
• What do you tell them to put their mind at rest?
• What goes wrong on jobs, and how do you handle it?

Write the answers down in plain sentences. That is your website. It will be rougher than the AI version and ten times more useful. AI can then be used honestly - to tidy the grammar, not to invent the substance.

The irony of paying an agency to use AI is that you could have done it yourself in twenty minutes for nothing.

If you want it done properly without an agency in the loop, that is what I do. SkipTheAgency's Maintained plan starts at £65/month, and rewriting the copy on a small site is part of the work, not a £400 line item. I will sit on a call with you, ask the questions above, and write the site in your own voice.