Founder & Chief Executive Officer
As a marketer, I hate watching business owners hand their entire operation over to AI tools. The content strategy, the graphic design, the blog writing, even the social media captions. All of it, generated.
Take this from a marketing perspective rather than a philosophical one. The whole goal of marketing is to stand out from the crowd, so that when somebody is finally ready to purchase, they know exactly where to go and the idea to buy from you is already sitting in their head. That is the job. That is what you are paying for when you pay for marketing.
So here is the question I want you to sit with. How will you stand out from the crowd if you sound, look, and write exactly the same as everybody else?
Strip marketing back to its purpose and it comes down to one thing. When a person reaches the moment they are ready to buy, your name needs to be the one that surfaces.
That only happens if something about you lodged in their memory. A point of view they remembered. A story that stuck. A way of explaining something that made them think, this person actually gets it. Memory requires distinctiveness, because the brain does not store things that blend into everything around them.
Which means marketing that makes you indistinguishable is not weak marketing. It is marketing working directly against its own objective. You are spending money and effort to become forgettable, which is the one outcome you were trying to avoid.
Summary Marketing works by making your name surface when someone is ready to buy, which requires being memorable. Content that makes you indistinguishable works against marketing’s own purpose.
This is no longer a matter of opinion or taste. Researchers have quantified it.
A study from Stanford University, Imperial College London, and the Internet Archive found that by mid-2025, around 35% of newly published websites were AI-generated or AI-assisted. The more revealing finding is what they measured about those sites. AI-generated pages scored 33% higher on semantic similarity to one another than human-written pages did. They repeat the same ideas and phrasing across sites far more than human writing does.
Separately, an Ahrefs study of around 900,000 pages found that roughly three quarters of newly created web pages contain some AI-generated content. So the crowd you are trying to stand out from is enormous, and it is converging on a single voice. Walking into that with generated content means arriving as one more instance of a pattern that already exists hundreds of thousands of times over.
Summary Stanford-led research found AI-generated sites score 33% higher on semantic similarity to each other than human-written ones, and Ahrefs found roughly three quarters of new web pages contain AI content. The sameness is measurable.
Of everything on that list, content strategy is the one I would protect most fiercely.
Your strategy is the set of decisions about who you serve, what you stand for, what you refuse to do, and what makes working with you different from working with anyone else. Those decisions come from your experience of actually running your business, the clients who taught you something, the work you turned down, the problems you have solved repeatedly.
A tool generating your strategy produces the statistically average approach for a business like yours, because that is what it was built to do. Average is precisely what you are trying to escape. When your strategy is generic, every piece of content built on top of it inherits that genericness, no matter how carefully you edit the words afterwards. The sameness starts upstream.
Summary Strategy is the set of decisions that define how you differ, drawn from your actual experience. A generated strategy produces the statistically average approach, and every piece of content built on it inherits that genericness.
The graphic design piece deserves its own mention, because visual sameness registers even faster than written sameness.
Somebody scrolling makes a judgment about your brand in a fraction of a second, before reading a word. If your graphics use the same layouts, the same stock aesthetic, and the same generated imagery as everyone in your industry, you have lost that moment. The visual did its job of being competent and failed its job of being yours.
This is why brand consistency matters so much, and it applies to your website too. Website design built on a generic template with generated imagery tells a visitor nothing about who you are, which wastes the most valuable real estate you own. A web developer can build you something that carries your actual brand, and that distinctiveness compounds every time somebody lands on your site and recognizes it.
Summary Visual sameness registers in a fraction of a second, before anyone reads a word. Generic templates and generated imagery on your website waste your most valuable real estate, while distinctive website design builds recognition over time.
There is a practical SEO consequence to all of this that business owners underestimate.
When a large share of content on a topic is generated from similar prompts, you end up with thousands of pages saying roughly the same thing in roughly the same way. Search engine optimization rewards content that adds something, and adding nothing is the defining characteristic of content assembled from the same average as everyone else. Google has also been explicit about targeting scaled, low-value content produced primarily to rank.
The AI search side makes this sharper still. Tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews surface content showing genuine first-hand experience, and after Google’s 2026 update, experience became the dominant signal. Generated content has no experience behind it by definition. So the strategy of producing content faster with AI runs directly into a search environment that is actively looking for the thing generated content cannot supply. A good SEO company will tell you the same, which is that the pages winning now are the ones carrying a real point of view.
Summary Generated content adds nothing new, which search engine optimization rewards poorly, and Google targets scaled low-value content. AI search surfaces first-hand experience, which generated content lacks by definition.
None of this means abandoning the tools, and I want to be clear about that, because the word that matters in all of this is depend.
Use AI to get unstuck, to organize messy thoughts, to tighten something you already wrote, to handle the administrative parts of production. Those uses save real time and cost you nothing distinctive. The line sits at anything that determines what you think, what you stand for, or how you sound. Those pieces have to come from you, because they are the only reason anyone would choose you over a competitor offering the same service at a similar price.
The practical version looks like this. You decide the strategy and the point of view. You supply the stories, the opinions, the specific client situations. The tools help with structure and tidying. If you want help building a strategy that is genuinely distinctive rather than assembled from averages, that is what a marketing consultant or fractional CMO does, and some marketing training can teach your team where the line sits. A marketing agency worth hiring will push you for the material only you have rather than generating around its absence.
Summary Use AI for structure, organization, and tidying, which costs you nothing distinctive. Keep what you think, what you stand for, and how you sound, since those are the only reasons someone chooses you over a similar competitor.
The purpose of marketing is to stand out from the crowd, so that when somebody is ready to purchase, they know where to go and the idea to buy from you is already there.
Handing your strategy, your design, your blogs, and your captions entirely to AI produces content that is measurably more similar to everything else than human work is, in a landscape where roughly three quarters of new pages already contain generated content. You cannot differentiate yourself using the same tool, the same prompts, and the same average that your competitors are using.
How will you stand out from the crowd if you sound, look, and write the exact same?
Sources:
Stanford University, Imperial College London, and the Internet Archive, The Impact of AI-Generated Text on the Internet (roughly 35% of newly published websites were AI-generated or AI-assisted by mid-2025; AI-generated sites showed pairwise semantic similarity scores 33% higher than human-written ones).
https://ai-on-the-internet.github.io/
Ahrefs, study of approximately 900,000 web pages published April 2025 (74.2% of newly created web pages contain some AI-generated content).
https://ahrefs.com/blog/what-percentage-of-new-content-is-ai-generated/
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