Recently, I talked to a lot of solo developers and vibecoders about copywriting and AI-generated landing pages by offering a simple, free copywriting audit to any creator who sent us a link to their AI-generated landing pages.
The core motive behind this was two-fold: first, we wanted to see whether concerns about AI writing being bland and uninspiring were true, and second, whether we could define a "good enough" standard from a purely developer-centric perspective.
While a couple of landing pages did have objective good copy on it, most of the results confirmed what our thesis: AI is not very good at copywriting for "real life" products and companies.
So, why is this the case?
Fundamentally, because AI tools usually are not given enough context to write high-converting landing page copy that is optimized for the particular underlying business. It's also not very useful when you lack specific domain knowledge for professional use.
Whatever Happened to "Clarity Over Cleverness"?
In the book "Copy Logic!", Mike Palmer and Michael Masterson describe the "CUB" review system for evaluating and improving marketing materials. The system is a simple peer review in which the reviewer must judge the quality of the work based on three criteria that make up the acronym, namely:
- C: Confusing
- U: Unbelievable
- B: Boring
The goal of this type of review is to identify the exact parts of the copy that suffer from these three foundational problems. Almost every AI-generated page we reviewed had these problems for some reason, and the advice I ended up giving most of them was similar.
I can't stress this enough, but don't take your visitors' attention for granted. If you are a new brand and have zero capture of the broader zeitgeist, it is hard to justify being clever over being clear. Most of the AI-generated content I reviewed didn't understand this fundamental principle, which was infuriating.
My personal theory for why AI goes for the vague and clever over the sharp and clear is that it literally has no idea whether you're a vibecoder trying to get your first customer or Cloudflare trying to make a quick landing page. When it's confused, it seems to default to assuming people care about your brand. This leads to a mismatch.
This is especially true in headlines, which are often the most visible part of any landing page copy. When it comes to headlines, the golden rule is to never waste the reader's time. We often see AI default to the "No [x], No [y], Only [xyz]" pattern in headlines, which is the opposite of respecting your user's time. This is doubly important if the user has no fundamental reason to care about your product (i.e., you already have a brand image the visitor recognizes).
Objectively, this is a mistake worthy of committing seppuku if you care about writing professional copy that converts.