AI-Generated Copy: When It Boosts Your Ecommerce Conversions (and When It Hurts)
AI-generated content can be great for your ecommerce website—but only if used strategically. While it shines for straightforward tasks like FAQs, product descriptions, and policy pages, it can harm your brand’s authenticity if used on blogs, About pages, or key promotional copy. Balancing AI’s efficiency with genuine human storytelling ensures you convert visitors without sacrificing trust.
When done well, AI-generated copy can be a powerful tool in creating an ecommerce site that’s designed to convert.
When used poorly, it can sink your reputation and deflate sales.
So — how to do it right?
I. Where we are with AI-generated text
II. Where it goes wrong
III. Where not to use it: FAQs
IV. Where not to use it: Product descriptions
V. Where not to use it: Policies
VI. Where to use it: Blog posts
VII. Where to use it: About pages
VIII. Where to use it: Key display copy
IX. Summary
I. Where we are with AI-generated text
We’ve only been living with mass-generated AI text for a brief time, but as it improves, so do users’ ability to spot it: Witness the recent em-dash scandal of 2024-2025. Readers suddenly reported a spate of em-dash usage. Long beloved of literary novelists and excitable essayists — as well as anyone looking to add some energy to an otherwise dreary sentence! — the otherwise underused punctuation was suddenly everywhere, and no one liked it. Here’s how one Reddit user explained the situation.
I'm becoming increasingly suspicious of emails I'm receiving from a particular colleague who I feel is using AI.
There's just something slightly off with them. Almost like they are too perfect and concise.
One thing I notice is that they use 'em dashes' a lot, for example—like this. Typically, I and everyone else I know use standard hyphens - like this. I didn't even know there was a shortcut for an em dash until looking this up.
I notice AI typically uses em dashes which raises my suspicions. Are em dashes normal? Does anyone else use them in casual emails? Are they an indicator of AI enhancement?
While the writer goes on to say “there’s nothing wrong with using AI”, consider all the language surrounding it: There’s something off about it. They’re too perfect. Suspicions are raised.
At least for the moment, readers mostly assume that the text they’re reading was, indeed, written as it has been for millenia: by a human being. This goes double for the situation above, when the writer is describing messages from a colleague. When we think we’re talking to a person — but are in fact talking to a machine — we’re unnerved.
II. Where it goes wrong
The situation is slightly different within a commercial context, where a certain amount of artificiality is presumed and accepted — but that underlying sense of unease, when it arises, can still engender negative responses, including some practical (and probably accurate) ones. AI copy has a reputation for being superior to poor human-generated text but still inferior to the best human-generated text. And in fact, its emerging ubiquity has had the rather poignant effect of making good human-generated copy even more effective, since its emotional resonance and complexity stand out even more in a sea of mostly perky, straightforward copy issuing from ChatGPT and its rivals. As X would have it: AI text is still, for the moment, generally regarded as a bad writer’s idea of what good writing should be.
Because the best human text is still superior to most machine-generated text — and because everybody knows a high school student using AI to produce their homework — it has a reputation for being a cheap substitute. Using it in the wrong places will make it look like — or in fact bear out the fact that — human-generated copy was too expensive. Which makes your brand look cheap, inept, and untrustworthy. All of these are strong barriers to conversion and can undo your hard work.
So where should you use AI copy?
III. Where not to use it: FAQs
AI copy excels at high-volume, low-affect text. Do you have a FAQ? AI can write it in a way that most users will find accessible and informative. Unless you’re using your FAQ as a way to communicate your brand voice in a nontraditional way, it’s an appropriate and useful place to privilege clarity and information over personality and pizzazz.
IV. Where not to use it: Product descriptions
If you feel like your current product descriptions aren’t working for you, consider having AI edit them for clarity and information. The most important aspect of conversion optimization is a true, tested understanding of what your users want — do they want more details? Fewer? Additional ideas for how to integrate your products into their lives? Once you know that, AI can edit product descriptions to conform to those guidelines, without you or your team rewriting what you have on your own.
V. Where not to use it: Policies
You might already be using policy text — for privacy, cookies, returns, etc. — generated by AI. This is another example where machine clarity is highly useful.
Now where shouldn’t you use AI?
Michael Dougherty
Head of sales
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Book a discovery callVI. Where to use it: Blog posts
You can’t convince us otherwise: Using AI on blog posts/content marketing is bad. A shorter, weirder post from a staff member, who’s truly incorporating their own opinions, experiences, and viewpoints into the post, will be 1000 times more interesting, and trust-conferring, than what AI can come up with — and is simultaneously serving to all your competitors. The only way to stand out is to take your ideas into the real world, test them, and share what you discover with your community.
We’ll add that many major sites are extremely judicious about how they use AI in their blog spaces because they believe that this copy, unless produced exceptionally well, results in lower Google search rankings.
VII. Where to use it: About pages
We’ve long believed that the About page is a unique opportunity to share your personal story with your community. Tell it as best you can, have a friend or staff member read it, and share it. We’re entering an age when nothing confers authenticity like imperfection — if you watched White Lotus, and pay attention to low-level showbiz news, consider the huge amount of attention that greeted actress Aimee Lou Woods’ notably imperfect teeth. They caused a media storm because of how unique they were, and how unlikely in today’s veneered world. That sense of authenticity was so strong that it crossed into her widely applauded performance. An imperfect but authentic About page will do the same for you.
VIII. Where to use it: Key display copy
We’re not at a point where AI can understand your brand better than you can. Hopefully you’ve tested your message with user groups and understand what works and what doesn’t. The challenge? To say that all in a unique, memorable way — and in under 12 words or so. We’ve tested this with AI, and this is an instance where its ability to offer clarity and concision can’t match human energy. Keep this task for a human.
IX. Summary
AI can be a powerful and budget-friendly tool — but relying on it too much will make you look like you lack acumen and sophistication. This is a classic case of using it neither too little or too much and instead finding a rewarding balance of machine-engineered clarity and a still all-too-human sense of dynamic emotional range.
