Why AI writing sounds like everyone — and how to fix it
Ask AI to write something for your business and it often comes back generic. Not wrong, exactly. Just not you. It reads as competent but anonymous, because it has been trained to sound like everyone at once.
The usual response is to keep tweaking the prompt. But “be friendly and professional” only gets you so far. The real fix is not a cleverer instruction. It is giving AI a tone of voice guide built from writing you have already published.
Most expert teams do not have one. The good news is you can build a genuinely useful guide in about ten minutes, using a free prompt and the material already sitting on your website and in your sent folder.
You do not need to invent a voice — you already have one
The mistake is treating tone of voice as something you have to create from scratch. You do not. Your voice is already there in your website, your blogs, your LinkedIn posts, and the emails you send to clients. The job is to show AI what you already sound like, then have it write that down clearly.
That is why feeding AI real examples beats describing the voice you want. “Confident but warm” means very little to a model. Ten samples of how you actually write means a great deal.
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How the prompt works
You will need an AI assistant — ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini all work — and the free prompt we share on our website. Paste it in and it runs through a short, guided process:
- It starts with your website. Give it your address and it reads your main pages to get a first sense of how you talk about yourself.
- It checks whether the guide should be written as a “we” for a brand or company, or an “I” for an individual expert.
- It asks for more material — client emails, brochures, marketing copy, blogs — to round out the picture.
- It sense-checks what it has found, showing you a generic sentence rewritten in your voice so you can confirm it is on the right track.
- It pulls everything into a finished guide you can download and use.
One small but important point: be careful what you paste in. If anything is sensitive or client-confidential, redact it before sending it over.
What the finished guide contains
The output is not a vague mood board. It is a practical document: a one-line version of how you sound, a section on your voice, the words and phrases you tend to use, what you avoid, a “do this, not that” set of examples, and a short note on context.
Often it surfaces things you would never have written down yourself — a preference for the rule of three, the fact that you are noticeably calmer with clients than in your marketing, or that you almost never use exclamation marks. Making those patterns explicit is what turns a vague sense of “how we sound” into something anyone can follow.
Why it is worth having
A tone of voice guide is the thing that lets work go out in your voice even when you are not the one writing it. Whether that is AI drafting a first version or a colleague writing on the firm’s behalf, everyone has the same reference to point back to.
Once you have it, put it to work. Upload it into a Claude or ChatGPT project, build it into a custom GPT, or paste it straight into a prompt. And treat it as a living document — when your writing evolves, or you produce something that feels especially on brand, come back and rerun the prompt to refine the guide over time.
Try it on your own writing
If you do not already have a tone of voice guide for your business, this is a low-effort place to start. It takes about ten minutes, it is built entirely from material you already own, and you end up with an asset you will use every time you ask AI to write something. The prompt is free to download from our website.
