Editing AI-written pages

Sort the pages before editing any

Split the site into three piles. Pages about your business, pages about your offer, and pages explaining a subject. The right amount of editing is completely different for each, and treating them alike is the common mistake.

Business pages carry statements only you can verify, so they need rewriting rather than polishing. Explanatory pages need their claims checked and their prose left alone if it is clear.

Offer pages sit in between. The facts are yours, the structure is usually fine, and the persuasion has to be yours because nothing generic will convince somebody to call.

The edits that change the result

Cutting the opening. Generated pages almost always begin by establishing that the subject matters, which the reader accepted before arriving. The page usually starts properly at the second or third paragraph.

Replacing generalities with specifics. Any sentence a competitor could publish unchanged either gains a specific or goes. This single pass does more than every other edit combined and typically removes a third of the words.

And moving the answer to the top. Our page on answer-first writing covers the pattern, and drafts fail it routinely by opening with context rather than with the answer.

The edits that do not

Rewriting for tone on a page nobody reads for tone. An accurate explanation of how a permit works does not become more useful for having personality added to it.

Adjusting word counts to hit a target. Padding is visible, and our page on thin content covers why length without substance makes a page worse rather than longer.

And endless reordering of sections that were already in a reasonable order. Structure matters, and the second rearrangement almost never beats the first.

A practical editing pass

This is the order we use. Working through it takes roughly fifteen minutes on a page of moderate length, and the first three items account for most of the improvement.

• Delete the opening paragraph unless it answers the title
• Check every claim against something real
• Add a specific to any sentence a competitor could publish
• Cut every adjective doing work a fact should do
• Make sure the page links to where the reader goes next
• Read the opening lines alone and check they stand up
• Read the whole page aloud once

Keeping your own voice

Voice survives editing better than it survives generation. Rewriting three sentences per section in your own words changes how a whole page reads, without rewriting the whole thing.

The sentences worth rewriting are the ones carrying an opinion. Where the page says what you recommend, what you avoid, or what you think the common mistake is, those should be yours.

Plain and factual is a safe default everywhere else. A page that reads clearly is never embarrassing, and an attempt at personality that misses reads worse than no attempt at all.

When to throw the page away

When it describes your business wrongly in substance. Correcting a plausible invention sentence by sentence usually takes longer than writing the section from scratch.

When the subject turned out to be one you cannot say anything specific about. That page should not exist, and deleting it is better than publishing a competent generic version.

And when two pages turned out to be the same question. Merge them. Our page on competing pages covers what happens if you leave both live.

Knowing when to stop

A page is finished when its claims are true, its opening answers the title, and it says at least one thing a generic source would not. That last test is also what an answer engine is weighing. Everything beyond that is diminishing.

Set a time limit per page and hold to it. Editing expands to fill whatever is available, and a site of twenty adequate reviewed pages beats five perfect ones and fifteen unchecked.

Then move on and come back later with evidence. Our page on auditing a site covers how to tell which pages are worth a second pass once they have been live for a while.