1. Start with the offer, not the tool

The most common mistake I see is opening the AI tool before knowing what the page is selling. The AI will happily write you a beautiful page about nothing.

Before I touch the keyboard, I write down four things on a scrap of paper:

• Who it’s for. Not “small businesses” — “freelance designers who bill by the project.”
• What they get. The outcome, not the feature. “Send an invoice in two minutes” beats “cloud-based invoicing platform.”
• What it costs them. Money, time, effort, risk. Every offer has a price beyond the price tag.
• Why they should believe it. One proof point: a number, a name, a testimonial, a guarantee.

If I can’t fill in all four, I’m not ready for the AI yet. A vague brief produces vague copy, and vague copy is the one thing a landing page can’t afford. Get the offer straight first; the tool just helps you say it.

2. Give the AI the brief a real copywriter would need

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most AI-generated landing pages sound identical because most people give the AI an identical brief. “Write landing page copy for a productivity app.” That’s not a brief. That’s a shrug.

The brief I paste in now reads more like a handover to a human copywriter:

“Write landing page copy for a time-tracking app for freelance writers. The reader is a freelance writer who loses 3–4 billable hours a week to admin. The product costs $12 a month, takes five minutes to set up, and has a 14-day free trial with no card required. The tone is direct and warm — no hype, no jargon. The headline must say what the reader gets, not what the product is. Keep every sentence under 20 words. Avoid the words ‘revolutionary,’ ‘seamless,’ and ‘cutting-edge.’”

The specifics are doing the work. The audience, the pain, the price, the objection (“no card required” answers the fear of being charged), the tone, the banned words — that’s what stops the output sounding like every other landing page. Spend five minutes on the brief and you’ll save thirty minutes fixing the draft.

3. Write five headlines, keep one

The headline is the only part of the page most visitors will read. So I don’t ask the AI for one headline. I ask for ten, and I throw away nine.

The prompt is simple: “Give me ten headline options for this page. Each one must promise a specific outcome. No puns, no questions, no ‘welcome to.’”

Then I judge them against three tests:

• Could it appear on any competitor’s page? If yes, it’s dead. “Work smarter, not harder” could sell anything. “Invoice your clients before your coffee goes cold” could only sell one thing.
• Does it contain a number or a concrete promise? “Save 4 hours a week” beats “Save time.” Specificity is the whole job of a headline.
• Does it make sense without the rest of the page? A visitor who reads only the headline should still know what you do and who it’s for.

My keeper usually comes from the list, but rarely verbatim. I’ll take the bones of option six and the verb from option two. That’s fine — the AI’s job is to give me raw material, not a finished line.

4. Let AI draft the body, then cut it in half

Landing pages don’t need paragraphs. They need a short chain of reasons: the problem, the fix, the proof, the ask. I let the AI write the full version first — usually too long, too formal, and stuffed with adjectives — and then I do the edit that matters most: I cut half of it.

Cutting is where the copy becomes yours. Here’s what I cut first:

• Adjectives doing the work of evidence. “Powerful, intuitive, game-changing software” becomes nothing, and then I add one real fact in its place: “Set up in five minutes.”
• The second sentence that repeats the first. AI drafts love to say the same thing twice with different words. The second one always goes.
• Features without a “so what.” “Syncs across devices” becomes “Start an invoice on your laptop, finish it on your phone.” If I can’t add the “so what,” the feature doesn’t make the page.

What survives is usually three short sections: what it does, why it’s different, and what happens next. Each one two or three sentences. Visitors scan; give them something worth scanning.

5. The button is a decision, not a decoration

The call to action is the smallest text on the page and the most important. “Submit,” “Click here,” and “Learn more” are all ways of saying “I didn’t think about this part.”

I ask the AI for button copy as a separate job, with its own prompt: “Give me eight button labels for this page. Each one must complete the sentence ‘I want to…’ and name the outcome, not the action.”

That’s how “Start free trial” becomes “Start tracking my time,” and “Get started” becomes “Send my first invoice.” The difference is small on the page and large in the click-through rate — in my experience, a button that names the outcome consistently outperforms one that names the action.

One more thing: put the price or the risk-remover next to the button, not buried in a FAQ. “Free for 14 days · No card required” sitting right under the button answers the objection at the exact moment the visitor feels it. The AI won’t think of that. You have to.

6. The ten-second stranger test

Before any landing page goes live, I run it past someone who knows nothing about the product — a friend, a family member, anyone. I show them the page for ten seconds, hide it, and ask three questions:

• What does this thing do?
• Who is it for?
• What would you click next?

If they can’t answer all three, the copy has failed, no matter how good it reads. I once ran this test on a page I was proud of and the answer to question one was “something to do with computers?” The headline was clever. The page was useless. I rewrote the headline in plain words and conversions doubled.

AI can’t run this test for you. It wrote the page, so it already knows the answers. The stranger is the only honest reader you’ve got — use them before your visitors vote with their back buttons.

The honest truth

AI is genuinely good at landing page copy, and I use it on every page I build now. It’s fast, it never runs out of headline options, and it doesn’t get precious about its sentences — which makes it easy to cut.

But the AI doesn’t know your customer, your offer, or your proof. It can’t tell you that your headline could belong to any competitor, or that your button says nothing, or that a stranger wouldn’t understand the page in ten seconds. Those are human judgments, and they’re the ones that move the conversion rate.

So let the AI write the first draft. Then be the editor it can’t be: cut half of it, sharpen the headline until it’s specific, name the outcome on the button, and show it to a stranger. The tools make the writing fast. You make it work.

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