Which pages AI should never write for you

I get asked this about once a week, usually phrased as "can I just use ChatGPT for my website". The answer is yes for some of it and please don't for the rest. Nobody ever tells you where the line sits.

Most owners assume the line is difficulty. Hard pages get written by a person, easy pages get generated. That test is wrong in an expensive way, because some of the easiest pages on your site do the most work.

The line that matters is how much of a page's value comes from something only you have. Your judgement about what you sell and who to. Your positioning. Your prices. Your liability if a claim turns out to be wrong. A model has none of that and cannot get it, however good your prompt. Where a page's value is mostly your own judgement, generating it strips out the only thing that made it worth reading.

The pages to keep human

Your homepage

Ask ChatGPT to write your homepage and it produces something perfectly reasonable. That is the problem. Reasonable is the average of every homepage in your industry, so it says what your competitors say, in the order they say it.

A homepage has about eight seconds to tell someone what you do, who for, and why you rather than the other five tabs they have open. That last part is a decision, not a writing task, and nobody outside your business can make it. I have watched owners generate a homepage, read it back and think "yeah, that's about right" - because it is about right. It is right for everyone in the trade. The sentence that wins the job is the one your competitors could not honestly write: you only take commercial work, you turn up on the day you said, you have the only practitioner in town doing a particular thing. AI cannot know which of those is true, so it writes around all of them.

Homepages rarely rank for the specific searches you want either, for reasons I set out in why your homepage can't rank for everything.

Your about page

The about page is not really an about page. It is the trust page. People land there in the thirty seconds before deciding whether to fill in your form, and not for your story. They are checking whether you are a real business run by real people.

Generated about pages talk about passion, commitment and a customer-first approach. Those words are free and everybody uses them, so they carry no information. Somebody who came specifically to reassure themselves gets told nothing and leaves less confident than they arrived. That is worse than no about page at all.

What works is boring and specific. When you started and why. What you did before this. How many people work there. Who answers the phone. Two honest sentences of that beat a page of adjectives, and a model cannot produce any of it without inventing it - which it will, cheerfully, if you let it. See how to stop AI inventing facts for the rest of that problem.

Anything with a price or a guarantee on it

Prices and guarantees are not copy. They are commitments. A generated pricing page will happily produce a call-out fee, a "from" figure, a turnaround time or a satisfaction guarantee you never agreed to, because it is pattern-matching off thousands of other pages, not consulting you.

Then a customer quotes it back at you. I have seen a business caught out by a price that was merely out of date rather than invented, and even that was awkward. An invented one is worse, and it is not the AI standing at the counter having that conversation. Write your own numbers, and your guarantee in the words you would use if someone rang and asked you to honour it.

Anything in a regulated field claiming an outcome

Health, legal, financial, insurance - anywhere a professional body has rules about what you may say. This is the highest-consequence item here and the one owners most often miss, because the output looks so calm and professional that it does not read like a risk.

Ask for a page about a treatment and you get language about results, relief and improvement, because that is how the internet writes about treatments. Whether you may write it that way depends on your registration, your profession and which country you are in. Australia's advertising rules for registered health practitioners are stricter than most people realise and extend to testimonials; New Zealand's rules differ again. A general-purpose model tracks none of it and will not warn you. If your industry has an advertising standard, the page making the claim gets written by someone who has read that standard.

Case studies and testimonials

This should be obvious and somehow is not. Asking AI to tidy up a testimonial routinely produces a version the client never said, still attributed to them by name. Give it thin notes for a case study and you get confident specifics - timeframes, percentages, outcomes - that came from nowhere.

The entire value of a case study is that it is verifiably true. The moment one number is generated rather than measured, the page is a liability instead of proof, and later you cannot tell which numbers were which. Let AI arrange your real notes, then check every figure against the source.

The pages that already rank well

Nobody puts this on the list and it is the one that costs the most. If a page sits at position two or three for a term that brings you work, leave it alone. The temptation, once you have a tool that rewrites pages in seconds, is to do the lot in a weekend.

Google has already decided that page is a good answer. You do not know which parts earned the decision, and neither does the model. Rewriting it gambles your best asset to fix something that is not broken. If a price changed, edit that bit by hand. And if a good page is stuck at three or four, more words is almost never the answer - that is an authority gap, meaning the page is fine and needs links pointing at it.

Where AI genuinely earns its place

None of this means keeping AI off your website. I use it every day, on the parts of writing that are mechanical - which on most sites is the bulk of the work.

First drafts of service pages, once you have supplied the context

A service page is largely explanation: what the job involves, roughly what it costs, what happens on the day, what to expect after. Slow work, and a draft beats a blank page.

The catch is that a draft is only as good as what you feed it. "Write me a page about bathroom renovations" gets the industry average, which readers smell three sentences in. Paste your actual process, the four questions every customer asks, the two things you do not do and your rough price band, and you get a draft with your business in it. Output is only ever as specific as input, which is most of why AI content sounds generic.

Decide what the page is for and which searches it should answer before generating a word - that sequence is in plan before you generate. Be clear too on whether you are building a service page or a location page, because mashing them together creates pages that compete with each other, which I have untangled in service pages vs location pages.

Location pages built on a template you designed

This is close to the safest AI job on a website, provided you did the design work first. You decide what a branch page must contain: the address block, the services actually offered there, who runs it, the detail that proves you exist in that suburb. The template is the judgement. Filling it is mechanics, and mechanics is what AI is for.

The failure is skipping the template and generating twenty pages from nothing, which gets you twenty near-identical pages with the place name swapped and nothing local in them. Google has a name for those and it is not flattering. Fix the structure first with a location page template.

FAQ answers to questions you are genuinely asked

Not the questions a model guesses people ask. The ones in your inbox and coming down the phone. Pull ten real ones from the last month, answer each the way you would say it out loud, then let AI clean them up and expand anything thin. The value is in the question selection, and you did that.

The mechanical work on something you already wrote

Tightening. Restructuring. Turning a wall of text into sections with proper headings. Cutting nine hundred words to six hundred without losing anything. Removing repetition you stopped noticing years ago. This is where AI is genuinely excellent and the risk is near zero, because every idea on the page is already yours. It is the tidying you would do yourself if you had a spare hour, which you do not.

The rule, stated plainly

The more a page depends on judgement, positioning or liability, the less business AI has writing it.

Run any page through that sentence and you have your answer in five seconds. Your homepage is nearly all positioning. A guarantee is pure liability. An about page is judgement about what to disclose. A location page on your own template is mostly mechanics, because the decisions were made when you built the template.

It also explains why the difficulty test fails. An about page takes twenty minutes to write and is catastrophic to generate. A twelve-hundred-word service page is a slog and perfectly fine to draft with AI. Effort and risk are unrelated, so sorting by effort puts the tool exactly where it does most damage.

A practical way to sort your own site

Worth half an hour, once:

• List every page that produced an enquiry or a phone call in the last six months. That is the human column, no argument.
• Add anything carrying a price, a guarantee or a claim about a result, however boring the page is.
• Freeze anything sitting in the top five for a term that matters - hand edits only, no rewrites.
• Everything left is where AI is welcome: drafts, expansions, restructures, the pages you have meant to write for two years.
• Before generating, write down what the page is for and who for. If you cannot answer that in a sentence, the tool cannot either.

None of this is anti-AI

I am not precious about this. I use AI for the mechanical lifting on nearly everything I do, including drafting posts like this one, and I would be slower without it. What I do not do is hand it a decision. That split - the machine grinds, a person makes every call with consequences - is written up in keeping a human in the loop. For the wider version, start with using AI content without wrecking your site.

The tool is fine. The failure is almost never writing quality. It is handing over the pages whose only real asset was your judgement, then wondering why the site reads like everybody else's.