There are two confident camps on this and both are wrong. One says AI can write your whole website in an afternoon and anyone still paying a copywriter is being fleeced. The other says AI content is cheating, Google will punish you, and it all reads like a robot.
The truth is more useful than either. AI is genuinely good at some parts of writing a business website and genuinely bad at the parts that actually win you customers, and knowing which is which is most of the skill.
First: does Google penalise AI content?
No, and this is worth being precise about because a lot of nonsense is sold on the back of it.
Google's published guidance is origin-agnostic. It judges whether content is helpful, accurate and original, not which tool produced it. There is no blanket penalty for using AI, and there never has been.
What Google does act against is scaled content abuse: pumping out large volumes of low-value pages mainly to game rankings. That policy applies regardless of whether a person or a machine wrote them, and Google's 2026 core updates have specifically targeted sites publishing mountains of unedited AI pages.
So the question was never "will I be penalised for using AI". It is "is this content any good", which is the same question it has always been.
What AI is genuinely good at
- Beating the blank page. A rough first draft in thirty seconds is worth a lot when the alternative is a services page you have been meaning to write since March.
- Tidying your own words. Ramble into your phone about a job you just finished, hand it the transcript, and ask for it to be tightened. The substance is yours, the polish is quick.
- FAQ sections. Give it the questions customers genuinely ask you and it will draft clear answers. Add your real prices and policies afterwards.
- First-pass translation. Useful for a bilingual site, with the strong caveat below.
- The boring bits. Meta descriptions, image alt text, page titles. Tedious, formulaic, and it does them well.
What AI is bad at, and why it matters most for you
- Facts about your business. It does not know your prices, your coverage area, your guarantee or your lead times. Ask it anyway and it will produce something plausible and wrong. Every factual claim on your site has to come from you.
- Local knowledge. Which neighbourhoods you actually cover, what the ITV or community rules mean in practice here, what customers in your town specifically worry about. This is precisely the detail that makes a page useful, and it is the detail AI invents.
- Your first-hand experience. The job that went wrong and how you fixed it. The thing you always tell clients that nobody else mentions. Your competitor can buy the same AI subscription; they cannot buy your twenty years on the tools.
- Sounding like a person. Left unedited, it sounds like everybody else, which is a strange thing to pay for when your whole advantage is being a local business run by a human being.
How readers spot unedited AI copy
They may not name it, but they feel it. The signs are consistent: an opening paragraph that restates the title, phrases like "in today's digital landscape", tidy lists of three, confident sentences that contain no actual information, and a total absence of names, numbers, prices, places or opinions.
Here is the test. Read a page and ask whether any competitor could publish it word for word by swapping the business name. If they could, it is not doing anything for you. Specificity is the whole game: a real price, a real street, a real job, a real opinion.
A workflow that actually works
- Brief it with your facts. Prices, area, services, the questions you get asked, one or two real examples. Rubbish in, rubbish out applies more here than anywhere.
- Get a draft. Treat it as a first draft by a keen assistant who has never met your customers.
- Cut hard. Delete every sentence that could appear on any competitor's site. Usually a third of it.
- Add what only you know. This is where the page becomes worth reading, and it is the step nobody skips and gets away with.
- Check the facts, then read it aloud. Anything AI stated about your business, verify. If a sentence would embarrass you to say to a customer's face, rewrite it.
A specific warning on Spanish and translation
Machine translation is good enough to be dangerous. It will produce Spanish that is grammatically fine and subtly foreign, which reads as an out-of-town business, and that is the opposite of what a local site needs. It is also risky for anything legal or price-related, where a small mistranslation changes the meaning of a commitment. Use it for the draft, always have someone fluent check it, and never publish translated legal or pricing text unread. More on doing bilingual properly in do you need a bilingual website on the Costa del Sol.
Where this sits with AI search
Worth connecting to what AI Overviews changed. Since AI answers are assembled from sources, generic content is doubly pointless now: it neither ranks nor gets cited, because it adds nothing that is not already in a hundred other pages. The content most likely to be quoted is specific, clearly written and genuinely informative. Which is, conveniently, also the content that persuades human beings.
How we use it, honestly
We use AI daily, including for parts of this blog. Every post is researched, fact-checked and edited by a person before it goes live, statistics are traced to their original source rather than copied from whoever repeated them loudest, and anything about a client's business comes from that client rather than from a model's imagination.
That is the honest version of AI content: a fast assistant, supervised. Anyone offering you hundreds of AI-written pages for a flat fee is selling exactly the thing Google's scaled content policy exists to catch.
Frequently asked questions
Will Google penalise my site for using AI?
Not for using AI as such. Google evaluates the quality and usefulness of the content, not the tool. What gets penalised is mass-produced low-value pages made to manipulate rankings, whoever or whatever wrote them.
Can I publish AI content without editing it?
You can, and it is the most common way to end up with a site that says nothing. Unedited output contains no facts about your business, tends to invent the ones it needs, and reads like every competitor. Editing is not optional, it is where the value is added.
Can people tell if content was written by AI?
Detection tools are unreliable, but readers pick up the flavour: generic openings, no specifics, no personality. What they actually notice is not "this is AI" but "this tells me nothing", and the effect on your enquiries is the same.
Is AI good enough to translate my website?
For a first draft, yes. As a final version, no. Have someone fluent review it, especially prices, guarantees and legal text where a subtle error changes what you have promised.
Should I use AI to write my Google reviews or replies?
Never for reviews. Fake or incentivised reviews breach Google's policies and can get your profile penalised, as covered in how to get more Google reviews. For replies it is fine as a drafting aid, as long as you personalise each one and the facts are yours.
Used properly, AI takes the friction out of keeping a website current, which is the reason most small business sites go stale. Used lazily, it produces pages that could belong to anyone. If you would like the useful version, our AI content service does exactly this: AI for speed, a person for the parts that matter. Or get in touch and we will tell you honestly whether your pages need rewriting at all.