A joiner in Wakefield showed me what ChatGPT had written for his “About Us” page. It described his business as “a leading provider of innovative solutions dedicated to delivering excellence.” He fits kitchens. Nothing in that sentence told me he’d been fitting them in the same three postcodes for eighteen years, or that half his work comes from word of mouth because he turns up when he says he will. It could have been written for a bank. Or a software company. Or nobody at all.
He wasn’t daft for trying it. Everyone’s trying it. And most people get exactly what he got.
Why AI content sounds generic
Here’s the bit nobody tells you. The AI isn’t bad at writing. It’s brilliant at writing. The problem is what you fed it.
Most business owners either type “write me a blog post about accounting services” and hit enter, or they add one vague instruction like “professional but friendly” and think that’s calibration. It isn’t. “Professional but friendly” describes about four million businesses in Britain. It means nothing to a machine that has never met you, never sat in your office, and has no idea what makes you different from the accountant two doors down.
Think about it like hiring a copywriter. If you brought someone in, sat them at a desk, and said “just write something professional but friendly about us,” they’d stare at you. A good copywriter asks questions first. What do you actually do. Who do you do it for. What do people say about you when you’re not in the room. They dig for the specific, human detail that makes copy sound like you and not like a template.
AI needs the same brief. Skip it, and you get the answer everyone gets: safe, smooth, and forgettable.
The fix: 7 questions
I’ve boiled this down to seven questions. Answer them properly, honestly, in your own words, and you’ve got a brief better than most agencies bother writing.
Q1: How would you describe your business to someone at a barbecue? This strips out the jargon. Nobody explains their job to a stranger holding a burger by saying they’re “a solutions-focused provider.”
Q2: What is the one thing you want every customer to know about you? This forces you to pick a single message instead of trying to say everything at once, which is how you end up saying nothing.
Q3: What do your best customers say about you, in their words, not yours? This is the one people skip and shouldn’t. Your customers’ language is more persuasive than your marketing language, because it’s proof, not a claim.
Q4: What is the biggest mistake people in your industry make when they try to market themselves? This surfaces your point of difference without you having to boast about it directly.
Q5: What topic could you talk about for an hour without notes? This finds your genuine expertise, the stuff that sounds confident because it’s true, not because it’s been polished.
Q6: Copy a sentence from your website that sounds most like you. This gives the AI a real sample of your voice instead of an abstract description of it.
Q7: Copy one that sounds least like you. This is just as useful. It shows what to avoid, and most people can spot the fake sentence on their own site immediately once you ask them to look for it.
Seven questions. None of them technical. All of them things only you know the answer to.
The prompt template
Here’s the tool itself. Answer the seven questions above, then paste this into ChatGPT or Claude with your answers filled in:
“I want you to write in my voice for my business. Here’s who I am: [Q1 answer]. Here’s the one thing I want customers to know: [Q2 answer]. Here’s what my best customers actually say about me: [Q3 answer]. Here’s the mistake most people in my industry make: [Q4 answer]. Here’s a topic I could talk about for an hour: [Q5 answer]. Here’s a sentence that sounds like me: [Q6 answer]. Here’s one that doesn’t: [Q7 answer]. Using all of this, write [the piece of content you need], in my voice, avoiding the tone of the sentence that doesn’t sound like me.”
That’s it. No plugin, no course, no clever prompt engineering trick. Just seven honest answers turned into a brief. I’ve used a version of this with a dozen clients now and the difference in output is night and day.
The bigger picture
Fixing the voice fixes one problem. It doesn’t fix the whole thing.
Sounding like yourself doesn’t matter if you’re saying the wrong thing, to the wrong audience, in the wrong place, too rarely for anyone to notice, or without any way of turning attention into enquiries. I’ve seen businesses with beautifully written content and no leads, because the content was never the bottleneck. Voice is one input. Strategy, channel choice, frequency, and conversion are the others, and most small businesses are weak on at least two of them without realising it.
Good content in the wrong system is just a nicer-sounding version of nothing happening.
If you want to know where you actually stand, there’s a faster way to find out than guessing.
Take the free AI Opportunity Assessment. It scores your business out of 110 in under three minutes. No sales call. Just a straight answer on where you stand.
