Open five startup homepages right now. Different companies, different industries, different cities.
Now read the first line of each one.
“We empower teams to unlock their potential.” “Solutions that elevate your journey.” “The seamless way to scale.” Cutting-edge. Next-generation. Built for the future.
You’ve seen this website a hundred times. And you can’t remember a single one of them.
That’s the real problem with building a website from one AI prompt. It’s not that the writing is bad. It’s that it’s the same. Same words, same soft gradient blob, same three feature cards, same “Get Started” button nobody clicks.
And here’s why it happens, because once you see it you can’t unsee it.
AI is trained on the whole internet. So when you ask it for a homepage, it doesn’t hand you a bold one or a weird one. It hands you the most likely one. The average of everything that already exists. And the average, by definition, is the thing that blends in.
One prompt doesn’t get you a bad website. It gets you the median website. (I wrote a whole post about why one prompt gets you slop. Sameness is the other half of that story.)
My two rules for a website have always been simple. If you confuse, you lose. And don’t be boring, be memorable.
Sameness isn’t a confusion problem. It’s worse. It’s a memory problem. A confusing site loses the visitor today. A boring, average, sounds-like-everyone-else site loses them slower. They read it, they nod, they leave, and twenty minutes later they couldn’t tell you your name. Nobody remembers the average.
So how do you not end up as one of the six?
You make the site sound like an actual human. Here’s what that looks like, and you can do every one of these today.
Say the specific thing, not the category. “We help teams collaborate” tells me nothing. What actually happens when someone hires you? Use the real number, the real before-and-after, the exact thing your customer said on the call. Specific is the opposite of generic, and it costs you nothing.
Steal your customers’ words. Go read your sales calls, your reviews, your support inbox. Your customers do not say “unlock potential.” They say “I stopped dreading Monday.” That sentence is sitting in your email right now. Put it on the page.
Have an actual opinion. Take a side. Tell people who you’re not for. The average homepage is scared of everyone, so it says nothing to anyone. A point of view is the one thing AI can’t blend into mush, because it had to come from you.
Put a human on it. Your face, your team, your voice, the dumb story about how the whole thing started. AI knows a million homepages. It does not know what happened in your kitchen on a Tuesday. That’s your entire advantage. Use it.
Read it out loud. This is the test I run on every project. If you wouldn’t say the sentence to a customer’s face on a call, cut it. Nobody has ever said “we deliver seamless solutions” out loud and meant it.
Now here’s the part people get wrong. None of this means stop using AI.
I rebuilt my entire site with AI. And the whole fight, all 67 rounds of it, was exactly this. The AI kept handing me the average, and I kept saying “no, that’s what everyone else sounds like, do it again.” That back-and-forth is the work. AI is the fastest pair of hands you’ve ever had. It just defaults to the middle, and your only job is to keep dragging it back toward you.
That’s the real skill now. Not avoiding AI. Pointing it away from the average and toward the one thing it can’t generate. You.
So go open your own homepage. Read the first line out loud. If it could sit happily inside any of those six boxes up there, you’ve got work to do.
Want a second pair of eyes on it? That’s exactly what a Sound Check is. You show me your site, I tell you where you sound like everyone else and where you sound like you. No fluff, no 40-page audit.
And I’m building all of this out loud on YouTube (@webguymike). Come watch me fight the average in real time.
Don’t be boring. Be memorable.
It’s go time.