“We’ve used LLMs to generate our content and it’s awful …can you help us fix it?”
I’m absolutely amazed at how often I’ve had this conversation with businesses so far in 2026.
Surely you can spot the type of thing by now — weirdly confident, hollow, verbose, overly formal. Content that sounds like it was written by something that’s read everything and understood nothing (because that’s exactly what it is). If that’s what’s living on your site right now, it’s quietly costing you.
“We needed content fast. ChatGPT delivered. Twelve months later, performance hadn’t moved and the enquiries weren’t coming. Ultimately, it’s disappointing that we put effort towards this thinking we were being efficient, and it’s backfired. Now we’re going backwards.”
Familiar?
How business owners are struggling with AI content in 2026
When ChatGPT arrived, it felt like the answer to everything. No more briefing writers, no more waiting on agencies, no more content costs. You could produce a month’s worth of blog posts in an afternoon. Landing pages, product descriptions, email sequences, easy. For a lot of business owners, it genuinely felt like a silver bullet: marketing output at a fraction of the cost, with none of the faff.
But so far, it hasn’t turned out that way, has it?
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Your customers hate it
Consumer backlash is growing fast. 32% of UK and US consumers now say AI is negatively disrupting their experience of brands, up from 18% in 2023. Don’t pretend your customers don’t notice.
52% say they would stop buying from a brand after an inauthentic experience (eMarketer)
If you think you know different / better… Good Luck.
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Search engines hate it
Google doesn’t penalise AI content as such — but it does penalise exactly what bulk AI content produces.
Sites publishing large volumes of unedited AI articles saw traffic drops of 40–90%.
Google’s December 2025 core update specifically targeted mass-produced AI content without expert oversight. I’m sure there will be further efforts. It’s not that AI content is penalised, but thin, generic, voiceless and inauthentic content does. It always has.
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Some AI agencies are out there to scam you
If you’ve been on LinkedIn in the last two years, chances are you know the issue.
The response to AI content problems spawned a new industry of “solutions” and scaremongering. Whether it’s GEO, AEO, LLM optimisation, AI-proofing. A lot of them are SEO with some fear, and a premium price tag attached.
Anyone selling you something more complicated than ‘SEO’ is quite likely to be selling fear, not collaboration with your business.
Why your AI content isn’t performing
Start with this study by Semrush, which found that
Human-written content holds an advantage across all top 10 SERP positions, but the gap is sharpest near the top where AI-generated content nearly doubles between position 1 and position 4.
Additionally,
(Ranking) position 1 results are 8x more likely to be human-written.
As the conversation changes on a seemingly daily basis, perceptions around AI content are changing fast. In my view, it seems there are two camps — people who think that LLM-generated content is ‘good enough’ to represent their business, and those that simply don’t. Obviously, there is a lot of nuance in between, but very-lazily, mass-produced content share some common threads.
What bad AI content looks like
- Not specific to your brand voice: it could belong to any business in your sector
- Generic positioning: ignores your USPs
- Wrong tone altogether: it’s so easy to spot, and your customers will not like it
- Search intent mismatch: maybe ranking for things your customers aren’t actually searching
- Indistinguishable from your competitors: possibly the worst one of all — it’s bland
- Not strategic: “write me a blog post about X” is not a content strategy
- More does not equal better… 100s of hollow pages is rarely going to work
I understand that business owners have gone into these decisions with the best of intentions. The important thing is the learning, and moving beyond.
I’ve developed AI Content Refresh to fix broken LLM content
Because I was having this conversation so frequently in Q1 2026, I developed a quick workflow to address the issue. While every business and the extent of the issue is different, it usually looks like the following two stages — audit then rewrite.
1. The audit
We go through your existing content and identify what’s underperforming, why, and what it needs to do differently.
I can go through just your AI-generated content, or more effectively, your entire site content page by page and work out what’s worth keeping, what needs reworking, and what’s ended up doing more harm than good.
This can consider traffic levels, CTRs, user engagement, ranking performance, competitor analysis, tone and positioning, and those tell-tale signs that are going to turn your customers off.
A report will give you a clear view of what needs to happen to each piece of content in order for your site to drive better performance. Alongside this, a prioritised plan of what to fix first based on where the biggest opportunities are, aligned with your business’ goals.
2. The rewrite
Once priorities are nailed down, we can rewrite it.
This can be a great time to refresh your overall messaging, tone, and update anything that’s sat there since the site first launched.
It’ll be tailored to your audience, built with performance in mind, structured around what your customers actually need to read.
A good copywriter will be able to do this part — what sets this process apart is ensuring the content rewrite is aligned with organic search. Not only will the content be human, authentic, and speak to your customers in the way you need to, it’ll all be structured for better performance in search engines. The copy that comes back sounds like a human with expertise wrote it — because one did.
The content that comes back is yours — it fits your voice, your market, your expertise, and your commercial goals. And it’s not as hard to get there as you might think.
Who is this for?
- You’ve bulk-produced AI content and organic performance is flat, declining, or non-existent
- You have content that just ‘exists’ — search engines don’t read it, customers certainly don’t either, and it’s not driving performance
- Volume has become an issue — too much with no owner, plan, or management of it all
- Something feels off — the tone, the voice, the results — but you can’t pinpoint why
- You went into it with good intentions and it simply hasn’t worked out (sadly, the most common)
Case Study: Reversing 100s of low-quality pages that Claude generated for a roofing business
A local roofing specialist came to us having invested heavily in an LLM-generated content plan — hundreds of pages mapped out, many already written.
On the surface, it looked comprehensive. In practice, most of it was worthless: thin pages targeting search terms with no real volume, zero local relevance, and nothing that reflected how the business actually talked about its work.
I audited the full list, cut the vast majority, and rebuilt the handful worth keeping — rewritten in the business’s own voice, with proper local intent and a reason to exist.
Less than 5% of the original page count made the cut. The performance followed from there…
You don’t need more content, you need content that works hard for you
Every site is different, so the scope and investment for a content refresh depends on the size of your site. If you’re not sure what you’re dealing with, the free initial audit call is the right place to start.
It’s a straightforward look at what you’ve got, what’s working, and where the biggest opportunities are. You know it’s wrong already, you just need the justification to take some next steps.
This page has been intentionally designed and created by a human without the support of LLMs, image generation, clickbait-y headings, or other things which blight the internet today.