An AI-Written Landing Page, and What It Missed

One of the most famous CMO coaches in the world is a long-time client of mine, four or five years. He has a lot of memorable sayings and headlines. I wrote all of those. That's not his specialty. His specialty is interpersonal, one-on-one coaching with high-level folks. He sent me a new landing page for his coaching business, and it was clear from the start that the company that wrote it had used an AI.

He doesn't write this stuff, and his strength isn't coming up with it. But he's seen so much of it over a thirty-year career that he knows when something is wrong. He just doesn't necessarily know what, or how to fix it.

It was so clearly written by AI. That isn't necessarily wrong. I've said in other posts: if it's not more valuable because a human wrote it, let an AI write it. But for your core landing page, for your coaching clients, it can't read like a machine wrote it.

What AIs are very good at is helping the reader understand you. What they always seem to miss is helping the reader feel that you understand them. And there is no faster, more efficient way to convey hope, safety and confidence in you as a vendor than to make the reader understand, right up front, that you understand them. Make them feel seen and understood. So that whole page had to be largely rewritten to do that.

That's the lesson. A use case page, I don't think a human needs to write. Use cases are usually read at the end of a sales cycle, not the beginning. Spec sheets, feature sheets and comparisons of different offerings can all be written by AI. Check them for accuracy. No one expects them to be persuasive, scintillating or emotionally resonant.

But for the top of the funnel, you probably need a human. The AI's power and specialty isn't making people feel understood. Its job is to make you understandable. Different goal. An important one, but always the second goal, never the first, when you're writing something persuasive and trying to make money.