Two businesses use the same AI builder and get very different websites. The difference is almost never the tool — it is the paragraph they typed into it.
When somebody tells us the site an AI built for them feels generic, we ask to see what they typed. It is nearly always one line: "a website for my catering business". That is not a brief, it is a category — and a category is exactly what you get back. An AI builder can only work with what it is told, in the same way a designer who met you for thirty seconds can only guess. Spend ten minutes on the description and the same tool produces something that sounds like your business. Here is how to write it.
A search is a few words aimed at a machine. A brief is what you would tell a competent person you had just hired. Write the second one.
You do not need special phrasing, keywords or any technical vocabulary. Plain sentences about a real business beat clever prompt tricks every time, because everything on the finished page is built from the detail you provide — and detail is the one thing the AI cannot invent for you.
What you do, specifically. Not "catering" but "we cater office lunches and corporate events for 20 to 200 people, mostly Pakistani and continental menus". The specifics are what stop the copy sounding like a directory listing.
Who it is for. "Office managers and HR teams booking recurring staff lunches" produces an entirely different site from "families booking a wedding". Same business, different customer, different website.
Where you operate. City, delivery radius, whether you travel. This shapes the copy and it matters later for local search.
What makes you the safer choice. Years in business, a certification, your own kitchen, a same-day guarantee, a recognisable client who is happy to be named. This is the material trust is built from, and nobody else can supply it.
What you want visitors to do. Request a quote, phone you, place an order, book a tasting. Say it plainly and the whole page arranges itself around that one action.
Here is the same business described properly. Read it as a single paragraph you would type in:
"We are Saqib Caterers, an office and events caterer in Lahore, running eight years. We cater corporate lunches, office events and small weddings for 20 to 200 guests, Pakistani and continental menus, from our own kitchen in Gulberg. Most of our customers are office managers and HR teams who order for recurring staff lunches and need it to arrive on time without being chased. We deliver across Lahore and travel up to 60km for events. We are food-safety certified, we cook the same day, and we have regular contracts with three software companies. The website's job is to get quote requests — a form and a phone number on every page. Tone: practical and reassuring, not fancy."
That is around 120 words and it took four minutes. Every sentence gives the builder something to use: the headline, who the page speaks to, the service list, the trust signals, the main button, and the voice. Compare it with "a website for my catering business" and you can see why one produces a real site and the other produces a template.
Some phrases carry no information, and a builder will fill the gap with the average of everything it has seen. "Professional", "modern", "high quality", "customer-focused", "one-stop solution", "passionate about excellence" — every business in every industry claims these, which is precisely why they say nothing.
Replace each one with the fact underneath it. "High quality" becomes "we cook the same day and we do not use frozen stock". "Professional" becomes "eight years, food-safety certified". "Customer-focused" becomes "one person handles your order from quote to delivery". Facts are specific, and specific is what makes a site sound like you.
If you do not say, you will get the default set. Name them instead — and keep the list short.
Most small business sites need five: Home, About, Services or Products, one page of proof, and Contact. Say what belongs on each: "Services should be three blocks — corporate lunches, events, weddings — each with what is included and roughly what it costs". If you are selling online, ask for the shop and the policy pages your payment provider will require.
A short list of full pages beats twenty thin ones. Our website checklist goes through this in more detail, including what to prepare before you start.
Tone is the part people forget, and it is one sentence of work.
Say who it should sound like, in ordinary words: "practical and reassuring", "warm, we are a family business", "technical, our customers are engineers and hate marketing language", "premium but not stuffy".
If you already have something written that sounds right — an email you send to new clients, a brochure, a message you send on WhatsApp — paste it in and say "match this voice". That single instruction does more than any adjective.
This is the step almost everybody skips, and it is the one that separates a site that works from one that merely exists.
Read the first draft as a customer would. Fix any claim that is not exactly true — an AI will write plausible filler like "trusted by hundreds of clients" if you gave it nothing better, and a claim you cannot stand behind is worse than no claim. Put your real numbers, names and guarantees in their place.
Then replace the images. Stock photos of a kitchen that is not yours undo everything the words just did. Phone photographs in good daylight beat generic stock almost every time, and if your product shots are weak, AI Mockups can turn plain photos into clean studio-style images.
Finally, read the home page out loud. Anything you would not say to a customer standing in front of you, rewrite in the words you would actually use.
The first draft is not the end of the conversation, it is the start of one — and asking for changes is a separate skill from writing the opening brief. Most people go wrong in the same two ways: they ask for six things at once, or they describe how the page makes them feel instead of what they want it to be.
Change one thing at a time. A follow-up that says "make the header smaller, change the colours to green, add testimonials, rewrite the about page and move the phone number up" hands the builder five competing instructions, and you will usually get two of them done badly. Ask for one change, look at what comes back, then ask for the next. It feels slower and it is considerably faster.
Point at the thing you mean. "The heading on the services page", "the three boxes under the hero", "the form at the bottom of the contact page". Naming the page and the section removes nearly all the guesswork. "It looks cluttered" does not — nothing in that sentence tells the builder which part you are looking at.
Say what you want, not what is wrong. "I don't like the photo" gives it nothing to aim at. "Replace the hero photo with one of our own delivery vans" is an instruction. Every complaint you have can be turned round into a request, and the turned-round version is the one that works. If the picture you want does not exist yet, Design Studio can generate one rather than leaving you stuck with stock.
Describe the outcome, not the method. You do not need to know what a hex code or a breakpoint is. "Make the phone number the first thing you see on a mobile screen" is a perfectly good instruction. "Set the heading to 42px" is not more precise — it is more fragile, and it is usually not the change you actually wanted.
Keep follow-ups short. The long, detailed brief was for the first build. A change is one sentence. Pasting the whole original paragraph back in with one word altered tends to trigger a rebuild instead of an edit, and you lose the parts you had already got right.
If the same request keeps producing the same result, change the verb. Asking again in the same words rarely helps. Say "rebuild this section from scratch as…" or "replace the pricing block with a simple three-column table". A stronger verb tends to get you a genuinely different attempt rather than a nudge of the old one.
Know when to stop prompting and just type. For a phone number, a price, a spelling or a single word in a headline, editing the text directly is faster and exact. Prompting is for structure and design; typing is for facts. People lose whole afternoons asking an AI to fix a typo.
Fix the words before the colours. This is the order that pays. Copy that says something true and specific will carry a plain layout; a beautiful layout will not rescue copy that could belong to anyone. Get the headline, the service descriptions and the trust signals right first, and you will find you care a good deal less about the shade of blue. And if you find it easier to react to something than to describe it from nothing, look through our templates first and write down what you like about two or three — "clean, lots of white space, photos at the top" is a description you can hand over.
Keep a note of what you changed and why. Not for the builder's sake, for yours. Two weeks later, when you add a page or somebody asks why the site says what it says, five lines recording the decisions you made are worth more than the whole prompt history.
Fill in the blanks, type it in as one paragraph, and you are ahead of almost everybody:
"We are [business name], a [what you do] in [city], running [X] years. We [services, specifically] for [who buys]. Most of our customers are [customer type] who need [what they worry about]. We cover [area]. What makes us the safer choice: [certification, guarantee, years, named clients]. The website's job is to get [the one action]. Tone: [two words]."
Keep it as a note. You will reuse it for your brand, your Google Business profile, your ads and every listing you ever fill in — the work of describing your business properly only has to be done once.
How long should a website prompt be?
Around 100 to 150 words is enough. What matters is that it contains specifics — what you do, who buys, where you operate, why you are the safer choice, and the one action you want visitors to take — rather than adjectives like professional or modern.
Why does my AI website look generic?
Almost always because the description it was given was generic, and because the first draft was published without editing. Replace vague claims with real facts and swap stock images for your own photographs, and the same builder produces a completely different site.
Do I need to put keywords in the prompt?
No. Plain sentences about a real business beat clever prompt tricks, and you need no technical vocabulary at all. The details that help you get found come naturally out of writing specifically — naming your city and delivery area, and saying exactly which services you offer and who buys them.
Can I paste text I have already written?
Yes, and it is one of the most useful things you can do. If an email you send new clients, a brochure or even a WhatsApp message already sounds right, paste it in and say "match this voice". That single instruction does more for tone than any list of adjectives.
What if the first site it builds is wrong?
Expect that, and treat it as a draft rather than a verdict on the tool. Fix any claim that is not exactly true, put your own numbers and names in place of plausible filler, replace stock images with your own photographs, then read the home page out loud and rewrite anything you would not say to a customer in person.
How do I ask for a change without rebuilding the whole site?
Ask for one change at a time, name the page and the section you mean, and say what you want rather than what is wrong — "replace the hero photo with one of our own vans" rather than "I don't like the photo". Keep the follow-up to a sentence: pasting the whole original brief back in with one word altered tends to trigger a rebuild instead of an edit.
Should I keep prompting, or edit the text myself?
Edit it yourself for anything factual — a price, a phone number, a spelling, one word in a headline. Direct editing is faster and exact. Save prompting for structure and design, where describing the outcome you want really is quicker than doing it by hand.
Write the paragraph first, then open the AI Website Builder and paste it in — the difference between a two-line description and a proper one is obvious immediately. When the site is live, an Online Store and the AI CRM slot into the same system, and our SEO tools help Google find it. Still deciding on the platform itself? Our AI website builder vs WordPress comparison covers the cost and maintenance side of that choice. Stuck on the description? Send it to us and we will tighten it up with you.