What to hand the AI,
what to keep off its bench

Somewhere along the line, "should I use AI for my copy" turned into a yes-or-no question — mostly because the people selling AI needed a yes and the people selling against it needed a no. It's neither. Your copy is a stack of small jobs, and each one gets its own call. The line between the columns is one sentence: hand the tool jobs where you supply every fact and it supplies the wording. Never hand it a job where it would have to supply the facts.

Here's the board.

Below are the recipes for the left column — a fill-in frame for each, blanks you fill with your real facts. They work word-for-word in any of the free chat tools from the AI hub — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Copilot.

The service-page draft

Draft a service page for [your trade] in [your town].
The service: [one service — not your whole list].
Build it from these facts and nothing else:
- [how you actually do this job — your steps, in your words]
- [the area you actually cover]
- [the thing you check or do that matters on this job]
- [what you won't do, if that's part of how you work]
Write it plain. No hype words. Do not add any fact, number, price, or claim I did not give you.

Feed it: your real process and your real area — the stuff only you know, typed rough is fine.

Done-check: run the inspection pass above, then hold the result against the chapter on writing service pages — that page defines what done looks like.

The Business Profile update

Write a short update for my Google Business Profile.
It's about: [a job type you just wrapped, a seasonal reminder, or a service you want noticed].
Use only these facts:
- [what you did or offer — general terms, never a customer's name or address]
- [your service area]
- [how to reach you]
Keep it short and plain. Do not invent details.

Feed it: one true thing worth saying this week. A short update is all the job calls for.

Done-check: inspection pass, then the chapter on Business Profile posts — what a good profile update looks like lives there.

The follow-up message

Help me word a follow-up message.
The situation: [estimate went out / job just finished / haven't heard back in a while].
What I want to say, rough, in my words: [type it however it comes out — the tool's job is the wording, not the content].
Keep it short and polite. No pressure lines.
Do not add anything I didn't say.

Feed it: your rough version. The message already exists in your head; the tool just irons it.

Done-check: read it out loud. If you wouldn't say it to the customer's face, it doesn't send. That check is yours alone — no chapter needed.

The cleanup job

Here is something I wrote:
[paste your draft]
Fix the grammar and tighten it up.
Keep every fact, number, and price exactly as I wrote it.
Do not add sentences. Do not change what I'm claiming.

Feed it: anything you've already written — a page, an email, the About paragraph you've rewritten four times.

Done-check: read your version and its version side by side. Any fact that moved in the wash goes back the way you wrote it. This is the safest job on the board, because every fact was yours before the tool ever saw it.

The never list

No jokes in this section. These are the jobs where the tool would be supplying the facts, which has a plainer name: making things up.

Reviews or testimonials. Never. Not "just as a sample," not "to see what one would sound like," not with a plan to swap in real ones later. Writing, creating, or selling a fake customer review is against federal law. The rule is the FTC's Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials, and it has been in force since October 21, 2024. The FTC has said AI-generated reviews are covered by it. In December 2025 the FTC sent warning letters to 10 companies over practices that may break the rule. It warned that violations can carry civil penalties of up to $53,088 each — the FTC's figure as of December 2025, still current in July 2026. (Codified at 16 CFR Part 465, § 465.2.)

Credentials. License numbers, certifications, insurance language, trade-association memberships. If you didn't type it into the frame, it does not exist on your page.

Prices it wasn't given. Leave a price blank empty and the tool can guess a number to fill it. It is not your number.

Claims about work you didn't do. Job counts, years in business, "we've served hundreds of families." Every one of those is a record you either have or you don't.

The whole class. Any blank you can't fill with a fact from your own records stops the job. The tool never fills a blank for you — that's the difference between a draft and a fabrication.

What Google says about AI-drafted pages

You'll hear it promised both ways — AI copy tanks your ranking, AI copy is a shortcut up it. Google's own guidance is narrower than either pitch. Its page on AI-generated content (last updated December 10, 2025) warns that using AI "to generate many pages without adding value for users" may violate its "scaled content abuse" policy. A separate Google post, still live and linked from it, says appropriate AI use "is not against our guidelines". Two different Google documents: the rule is about churning out many low-value pages, not about whether AI touched your draft. That's the whole policy on the record — no promise about your rankings in either direction. The vendor cons built on top of it are in the AI SEO scam; how AI search actually changes getting found is in SEO in plain English.

Every recipe on this page works for one reason: the facts were yours before the tool showed up. That's also why the never list is absolute. Your site earns trust one checkable page at a time — and one invented review can cost you all of it at once, with the one reader who checks. And it's illegal. Both of those are reasons enough on their own.

Next: how people spot machine-made copy — and how to keep yours from smelling like it.