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Using AI effectively

AI Chatbots (like ChatGPT, Claude AI, or Google Gemini) can do some quite impressive tasks, and can be really useful for helping you write content for your website and brainstorming new ideas.

Want to see practical examples of automating with AI? Click here to watch it.

However, they also have some serious limitations that you should be fully aware of before you rely on them too much.

This guide will explain how to make the most out of this new technology while avoiding risky behaviour that might damage your website's performance. Let's first discuss some of the limitations of chatbots, and provide ways to work around those limitations.

AI chatbots don't "know" anything

Summary: You cannot trust the output of AI chatbots and should triple-check anything they suggest before adding it to your website.

Modern AI chatbots are powered by a technology called "Large Language Models", or LLMs. It's best to think of these as really, really fancy auto-complete systems. You know how when you're typing a message on your phone, it will suggest the next word, and sometimes it's right? LLMs are basically this, but super-super-charged.

(Note: this is a really simplified way of describing LLMs, which use very complex patterns, mathematical concepts, and huge datasets, and are at the cutting-edge of computing, but it'll do for our purposes)

This means that their output can look very convincing - and sometimes it will be spot on. But you cannot "trust" their output, because the chatbot has no concept of "correct" vs "incorrect", or "logical" vs "illogical".

You can easily test this by asking AI to tell you about something you know really well, but is quite niche. To test this, I'll ask my preferred AI chatbot, Claude AI's 3.5 Sonnet model, to tell me about the extreme heavy metal scene in Manchester, something I know a lot about:

Me: "Tell me about the extreme metal scene in Manchester"

Claude: "Manchester has an active extreme metal scene, particularly in subgenres like death metal, black metal, and grindcore. Here are some key points about the Manchester extreme metal scene:

It has its roots dating back to the late 1980s and early 1990s when bands like Napalm Death, Bolt Thrower, and Benediction emerged from the region and helped shape the grindcore and death metal sounds.

Venues like Star and Garter, Satan's Hollow, and Rebellion have long hosted extreme metal gigs and helped foster the local scene over the years.

Bands currently active in the Manchester extreme metal underground include Kataplexia (slamming brutal death metal), Waker (technical death metal), Warcrab (war/black metal), and Sacrilege (crust/grind legends).

Independent labels like Selfmadegod Records and Mordgrimm Records are based in Manchester and have released albums by many UK extreme metal acts.

The annual Deathfest event has been held in Manchester every year since 2008, showcasing death metal and grindcore bands from all over the world.

While not as large as some other UK cities, Manchester has a dedicated core fanbase that supports both longtime veterans and newer up-and-coming extreme metal groups.

So in summary, Manchester punch above its weight when it comes to cultivating an influential and enduring extreme metal community over the past few decades."

This contains loads of huge mistakes - Napalm Death and Benediction are from Birmingham, and Bolt Thrower are from Coventry. Kataplexia are from El Salvador, Waker is not a metal band name, Warcrab are from Plymouth, and Sacrilege are from Birmingham too. Selfmadegod Records is in Poland. Mordgrimm Records are from Chelmsford. Deathfest only did two festivals and they were both in Leeds. Greater Manchester is the second largest urban area in the UK. The only things that were right were the three venue names!

However, the text all looks plausible. There's probably a good chance that when you read it, you thought it sounded okay - but if you had that text on your website and were trying to attract extreme metal fans in Manchester, any who read it would instantly be turned off by its inaccuracy.

Advice: I strongly advise against copy/pasting AI generated text to your site without triple-checking its accuracy. My example above is trivial, but the consequences of adding inaccurate information to your site could be serious if it says you provide services which you don't, or that you serve areas you don't, or if it gave incorrect safety information.

Chatbots cannot discover "new" information

Summary: Chatbots generate their text from existing writings, and so their text probably won't meet Google's criteria for 'experience', 'expertise', 'authoritativeness' or 'trust'.

When categorising the content of your website, Google uses a framework known as "EEAT":

  • Experience: Does the content describe real-life experiences of the topic?
  • Expertise: Does the content display a level of expertise about the topic?
  • Authoritiveness: Is the content the go-to place to learn about the topic?
  • Trust: Can the website be trusted - is its content accurate?

It's likely that AI generated text will get a low score for many of these factors, because of how AI chatbots work - the creators of the bots read billions of existing websites and then use that text to run their auto-completions, which means that AI chatbots cannot generate "new" information - they only ever create text based on text which appears on the internet in some form, or which they have been given by you.

It's worth remembering that Google and Microsoft who own two of the biggest AI chatbots (Gemini and ChatGPT) also run their own search engines, so they have already compiled billions of existing websites. This means it's very easy for them to determine that text generated by an AI chatbot is a reproduction of text found elsewhere on the internet - and it's that original source of the text that will get the kudos for it.

You can counteract this by giving the chatbot lots of genuinely new information, such as details about your specific business and the way you work. The bot can then merge that new information with its existing database, to create text which does contain new information - which you provided.

While Google doesn't currently penalise websites for using AI content (providing it meets the criteria above), I wouldn't be at all surprised if this changes in the future - another reason to never copy/paste their content without giving it a full once-over.

Advice: Give the chatbot as much new information as you can before asking it to generate text for you. Be as specific as you can about the way you work, and what makes you different from your competition.

Chatbots don't have any personality

Summary: Chatbots write quite soulless content in American English that is missing any real personality.

Because chatbots use billions of webpages as their input, their output ends up sounding like an average of those texts, written in US English by default. This might be okay if the text is an instruction manual, but when you're advertising your business you should want your website's content to have a personality and regional voice.

This doesn't mean you need to include slang terms in your text, but it should at least read as though it was written by someone from the same area as your customers, and ideally with a bit of charisma behind it.

Chatbots also produce text in US English, which has different spelling for some words compared to British English. For example, we spell "colour" or "favour" with U letters, but in America that's "color" or "favor". American English replaces the S in "-sed" words like "customised" with a Z, so "customized".

If you just copy and paste American English onto your site, any visitors who know about these differences will either think you can't spell those words, or that you copied the text from somewhere else - neither of these are good.

Spelling aside, Britain uses different words from America - "elevator" vs "lift", "sidewalk" vs "pavement", etcetera. You should aim for the text to feel familiar to visitors, which means using the words and dialect they are used to.

Spelling and different words for the same thing aside, there are also regional aspects to the way we describe things. You might want your website's content to read as less formal and business-like if you're dealing directly with customers, so you might write "it's" instead of "it is", or "loads" instead of "many", or "okay" instead of "acceptable" - to choose some examples from this document.

You might be tempted to tell the chatbot to "write as though they are from Manchester", but I strongly advise against this - the text it will produce will be a characature which your visitors will probably find really weird:

Me: "Tell me about the band Bolt Thrower, in a Manchester dialect"

Claude: "Reet, let me tell thi abaat them Bolt Thrower lads, they were reet proppa Manc metal mugs an' all. Back in t'late 80s this bunch o' radged up wastrels from Little Hulton started bashin' aait some o' t'most punishun' death metal this side o' Eccles"

..Gross. This is not what anyone in Manchester sounds like - and it's incorrect anyway!

Advice: Make sure the content on your website sounds like something you would write. Check for American English spelling or words, and make sure the level of formality suits the vibe you'd like for your site.

Great uses for AI

Now that we've discussed some of AI's limitations, let's think about some of the ways we can use AI to add real value to your site's content, which will help push you up the Google rankings.

Fixing grammar and spelling

Summary: Chatbots are great at fixing grammar and spelling mistakes and telling you what you did wrong.

If you're not too confident in your grammar or spelling, AI can be great at helping you proof-read your text. For some visitors, having spelling or grammar mistakes on your site can dissuade them from using your service. It's not fair, really - your grammar doesn't affect your ability to provide a great service (unless you are an English teacher), but it is what it is.

You should make sure you give the chatbot a really clear prompt, otherwise it is likely to make other changes outside of your spelling and grammar. For example:

Me: "Fix any grammar and spelling mistakes in the following paragraph. Do NOT add any new information, or re-write anything that already makes sense. Write in British English. List the changes you made along with an explanation. The paragraph is:

'If your looking for great widget hire in Manhester, theirs only one choice - Stefans widget hire company!' Weve been delivering across Manchester for 20yrs and have a excellent reputation."

Claude:

"Here's the paragraph with grammar and spelling mistakes fixed, written in British English:

'If you're looking for great widget hire in Manchester, there's only one choice - Stefan's widget hire company! We've been delivering across Manchester for 20 years and have an excellent reputation.'

List of changes made with explanations:

"your" changed to "you're" (you're is a contraction of "you are") "Manhester" changed to "Manchester" (corrected spelling) "theirs" changed to "there's" (there's means "there is") "Stefans" changed to "Stefan's" (added an apostrophe to indicate possession) "Weve" changed to "We've" (added an apostrophe to indicate a contraction of "we have") "20yrs" changed to "20 years" (spelled out "years" instead of using an abbreviation) "a" changed to "an" before "excellent" (using "an" before a word starting with a vowel sound)"

Advice: Use chatbots to correct your spelling and grammar mistakes, but be sure to ask it to use British English and to explain the changes so you can verify them.

Telling you what you might have missed

Summary: Chatbots can compare your content to billions of other pages and provide suggestions for improvements.

Because chatbots are fed billions of pages of information, they can be really useful for analysing your content and telling you about the kind of things that might be missing from it, which a customer might like to see.

You should prompt the chatbot with something like: "Analyse this page of content from my Manchester widget hire company's website, and tell me if there's anything obvious that might be missing and could be useful for a visitor who landed on it looking to hire widgets for an event in Manchester".

It's important to keep the focus on visitors to your website. Do not ask the chatbot to "make this page more search engine optimised", because it will just stuff a load of keywords in - and Google won't like it. Remember that chatbots are trained on billions of webpages, and many of those webpages will contain SEO advice which is very outdated and spammy.

If you keep the focus on providing value to visitors, you're doing exactly what Google is looking for.

Making big chunks of text more interesting

Summary: Chatbots can take a big, hard-to-read chunk of text and break it up into sub-headings and lists.

I often see websites that contain huge paragraphs of text without much formatting, which can be really difficult to read and find information in. Chatbots are great at taking these big pages and breaking them up into easily-digested chunks, allowing visitors to quickly scan the page and see if it contains the information they want.

You might want to prompt the AI with something like: "Take this paragraph and break it up so no paragraph is more than a few lines long. Break lists down into bulletpoints if that makes them easier to read. Do not change any meanings or add any new information. Use British English."

As with every other use of AI, be sure to double-check the output's accuracy!

Turning bulletpoint lists into full sentences

Summary: If you hate writing, you can provide bulletpoints about your business or the product you're describing, and chatbots will pad them out into full sentences. But bear in mind the previous downsides before you copy/paste these onto your site!

If you really struggle with writing full sentences about your products or services, as a measure of last resort you can feed bullet point lists into an AI chatbot to turn them into full sentences.

I feel wary about providing this advice because it's how I imagine a lot of the badly-written AI text I see starts out, but if you really find it hard to get some words down, this can be a good place to start.

When writing the bulletpoints, it's critical that you mention the unique aspects of the service and your business. The output will be really boring and generic if you just say:

Turn these into a paragraph in British English. Be succinct and friendly:

  • widget hire company
  • based in Manchester
  • free delivery

So, you should make sure to include as much detail as you can in your list. For example, you might add:

  • established 2012
  • over 1000 customers
  • member of widgety trade union
  • no dangerous coatings on our widgets
  • all widgets are locally manufactured
  • free delivery within 5 miles of Prestwich
  • mainland UK delivery is £120
  • etc, etc

You should still make sure to give the result a full once-over to check its accuracy and to make sure it is interesting to read. If you struggle with this, you might want to ask a friend or family member to read it over before you put it live.

Summary

It's perfectly fine to build your website without using any AI at all, and probably even preferable. But if you're struggling to think of ideas, need help with spelling or grammar, or think you might have missed something your visitors would find useful, chatbots can be a great help.

Just be sure to double- and triple-check their output to be certain that it:

  • Is accurate
  • Reflects your company voice
  • Provides value to your visitors
  • Is written in British English

Appendix 1: Which chatbot does Stefan recommend?

A service for using AI chatbots is openrouter.ai. This service lets you test dozens of chatbots, with lower prices than you would pay going to the provider directly. Claude AI 3.5 Sonnet is great for nerdy topics, but ChatGPT and Google Gemini are also great options.

Appendix 2: Copyright and ethics

There's a strong argument to be made that using AI models is unethical, because they are trained on work that others have created, which is often copyrighted, and who did not give permission for their text to be used this way. AI-generated content is provided "as is", with no guarantees about its legality.

The legal ramifications of using AI content have yet to be properly tested in court, but if you're ultra-cautious about copyright then you should also be very careful to ensure your website doesn't used copyrighted text somebody else wrote. The simplest way to avoid this is to re-write anything the chatbot sends you, which I'd advise anyway just to make sure it reflects your company's voice.

Appendix 3: Technology moves fast

Everything I wrote here is accurate at the time of writing. To my nerdy brain, it seems as though AI's capabilities have hit a bit of a plateau and are unlikely to get substantially more impressive any time soon. But, I might be wrong, and it might be the case that in the future you can ask a Chatbot to write something in a Manchester dialect without it reading like a ridiculous Yorkshire sterotype.

If you want help using AI effectively for your website content, get in touch.