What AI should not write

The underlying rule

A language tool writes text that fits the pattern of what you asked for. Where the pattern and the truth coincide, the result is useful. Where they do not, the result is confident and wrong in the same voice.

So the rule is about knowledge rather than about quality. If the answer exists only inside your business, your filing cabinet or a licensing register, a tool cannot reach it and will produce something plausible instead.

That plausibility is the danger. An obviously wrong draft gets fixed. A draft that says you have served the county for many years, when you started last spring, reads perfectly and ships.

Never, without exception

Testimonials and reviews. Writing a review that nobody gave is a lie. Regulators treat made-up endorsements as a serious matter. Our page on testimonials and reviews covers the rules. Nothing here is legal advice.

Credentials, licenses and registrations. These are matters of public record held by an issuing body. Anything a tool produces about them is a guess at a fact that somebody can check in a minute.

Results, case studies and figures about work you did. The numbers exist in your records. A drafted version will be reasonable, specific and invented, which is the worst combination available.

The full list

Each item below asserts something external to the text. That is the common thread and the reason the list looks arbitrary until you notice it. Everything on it can be checked by somebody, and will be.

• Testimonials, reviews and any endorsement
• Licenses, certifications and professional registrations
• Case study results and figures about past work
• Prices, fees and anything described as included
• Warranties, refunds and service commitments
• Safety instructions and anything with a physical risk
• Legal, medical and financial advice of any kind

Regulated trades need a higher bar

Where a trade is licensed, the licensing body also has rules about what you may say. A drafted page can break a rule nobody involved had heard of.

In practice the licensed person should write or dictate anything about the regulated service. A tool can help with the structure afterward. That keeps the writing where the responsibility sits.

Our compliance pages cover the common rules trade by trade. They explain what the rules say. They never give advice about your own situation, and this page is no different.

Where drafting help is genuinely useful

Explaining how something works. Structuring a page that exists as notes. Turning a long answer into a clear one. Producing a first draft of an educational page that a knowledgeable person then corrects.

Rewriting for reading level is another good use. Much small business copy is written in trade language, and reducing it to plain words without losing accuracy is a task a tool handles well under supervision.

So is the mechanical work. Alt text drafts, heading restructuring, meta description candidates and consistency checks are all low risk, because a person can see immediately whether the result is right.

How to hold the line in practice

Keep the facts that describe your business in one document that a person maintains. Credentials, dates, prices, coverage, warranties. Anything drafted then gets checked against that document rather than against memory.

Mark the sections of your site that fall inside the never list, and make it a rule that those sections are only ever edited by a named person. The page on human review covers the check itself.

Written down, this is a short policy. Unwritten, it erodes, because the pressure to publish quickly falls hardest on exactly the pages where a shortcut costs the most.

What happens when this goes wrong

Usually it is quiet. A claim sits on a page for a year, nobody checks it, and it is repeated by anything that reads the site. The damage shows up when a customer relies on it or a competitor reports it.

Sometimes it is loud. Made-up credentials and fake reviews are the two that bring complaints, which is why both sit at the top of the never list.

The fix is dull and it works. Check the claims, keep the proof, and accept that pages about your own business take longer to write than pages that explain a subject.