AI Content Gone Wrong, and How to Fix It

AI Content Red Flags | How to Detect Fake AI Content and Mistakes

When AI Content Misses the Mark (And Makes You Cringe)

You’ve seen it. Maybe even posted it. That blog that starts with “In today’s fast-paced digital world…” and ends with a vague call-to-action like “harness the power of AI”. You think it sounds polished…. ok…sure, but it’s actually completely soulless.

In recent weeks I was asked to review a newsletter, and the business owner who sent it did so with enormous pride in his proclamation that it was “written entirely by AI”. I was tempted to (but didn’t!) reply with “no shit, Sherlock!'” because referring to a dog grooming business as a “pioneering pet wellness haven” kinda was a hint. Close… but no chew toy.

That’s the problem, you see. AI tools are fast, shiny, and impressive, that is until your brand ends up sounding like a LinkedIn post written by a fridge.

In this post, I’m going to share many of the common traps small business owners fall into when using AI for content creation. But, more importantly, I want to give you some tips on how to sidestep them. You’ll walk away with practical fixes, smarter strategies, and hopefully a bit of a laugh at the wild things AI can come up with when left to its own devices.

Let’s kick off, yeah?

Wrong Move #1. No Clear Strategy or Use Case

It’s often called the “shiny object syndrome”. That lure of something bright, and flash, and new with bigger than life claims. Yep, AI tools and they’re being released by the hundreds each week. Everywhere you look, there’s a new AI tool promising faster content, smarter marketing, and fewer headaches. So it’s no surprise small biz owners jump in, hoping to save time or stretch their budget.

But here’s the trap: jumping into AI content creation without a clear strategy is like asking ChatGPT to write your wedding vows, without telling it who you’re marrying.

Without a defined use case, AI content floats around with no real purpose. You might end up with blog posts that sound slick but don’t align with your audience’s needs, or social captions that say a lot but mean very little.

A smart AI use case starts with three questions:

  • Who am I talking to?
  • What do I want them to think, feel or do?
  • How does this content serve a business goal (traffic, leads, conversions)?

If you can’t answer those, don’t fire up the chatbot yet. Instead, get clear on your end game, whether it’s creating a consistent blog calendar, improving email open rates, or repurposing your best-performing content. Then, and only then, use AI to help bring that plan to life.

🔧 Fix: Build a content brief first (even a quick one). Then prompt your AI tool with that context, so it supports your direction, not the other way around.

Wrong Move #2. Poor Prompting – Either Vague or Overly Complex

To be honest, most business owners using AI for their content leap into it with a prompt going something like this: “Write a blog post about social media.” That’s like telling a freelancer “just do a bit of marketing stuff”. And your point is?

Here’s the deal: Shit in, shit out. Vague inputs lead to vague outputs.

Plot twist: it’s often tempting to then go too far the other way, only to end up with the dreaded “prompt soup”, a 4-paragraph monster stuffed with so many instructions the AI short-circuits and spits out something either painfully literal… or just plain weird.

The trick is clarity, not complexity. Good prompts are like good briefs, specific, focused, and with just enough context to guide tone and purpose. Take this instance, below:

💬 Example bad prompt:
“Write an engaging article about AI.”

💡 Better prompt:
“Write a 700-word article for small business owners explaining 3 common mistakes people make using AI content tools. Use a conversational tone and include a practical example for each.”

Notice the difference? The second one gives direction, audience, tone, format, and purpose, all in two straight-forward sentences.

🔧 The Fix: Create and use a mini-template for your prompts. Suggested headings are:

  • Audience
  • Format
  • Tone
  • Purpose
  • Key points or outcomes

And, if that sounds all too-hard basket, reach out for some help, because I’m happy to make it simple.

Wrong Move #3. There’s No Human-in-the-Loop

Here’s a brutal truth: AI can churn out content in seconds, but left unsupervised, it can also churn out absolute rubbish, or even more concerning, misinformation wrapped in a confident tone.

Small business owners often fall into the trap of trusting the AI’s polish. It sounds convincing. It uses words like “robust” and “synergy” (ick). But, it can also confidently invent stats, misquote experts, and serve up bland advice dressed as brilliance. AI is a predictive language model and, though smart, it tells the user what it it’s programing is expected or anticipated given some huuuuuuuuge dataset.

That’s why a “human-in-the-loop” isn’t just a nice-to-have, it’s absolutely non-negotiable. Regardless of what you’re creating: a blog, a sales page, or an email campaign, someone with a brain (and preferably some emotional intelligence) needs to review, rework, and reality-check the AI’s work.

And then there’s tone. AI out-of-the-box often defaults to an American, corporate, slightly patronising voice, think “helpful robot from a customer service training video”. If you want your content to sound like you, you need to get in there and reshape it. Add sarcasm. Rewrite phrases. Replace “empower” with something a human would actually say.

Then there’s the ethical bit: if your AI content is built from scraped data, hallucinated facts, or outright misleading information… that’s a problem. You don’t need to give AI a writing credit, but you do need to check it’s not parroting bad info or nicking someone else’s IP.

🔧 Fix: Always do a human edit. Run a fact check. And if you’re outsourcing to AI tools, disclose it where appropriate (especially in industries where trust is currency).

Wrong Move #4. Missing Brand Voice

If your brand voice is what makes you sound like you, then AI, ahhh bless it, is just like the enthusiastic, fresh-faced intern who keeps accidentally slipping into corporate-speak, trying to keep you happy.

Fact is: AI’s default tone is safe, neutral, and wildly forgettable. And that’s perfectly fine if you’re writing an FAQ page for a tax calculator. But if you’re running a small business where personality, trust, and connection matter, generic AI output just won’t cut it.

Small biz owners often forget to tell AI what their voice actually is. And if you don’t feed it your flavour, it’ll default to sounding like every other chatbot on the block. Suddenly, your quirky brand that usually says “we’re not like the others” now reads like an onboarding email from a SaaS giant in Silicon Valley. And, yep, exactly like the others.

The fix? You have two options:

  1. Train it on your tone by literally pasting in past emails, posts, or content you’ve written and say, “Talk like this.”
  2. Rewrite everything it gives you so it passes the “could I have said this in real life?” test.

Also: brand voice isn’t just about how something sounds. It’s about what you say, what you don’t, and the turns of phrase that make your audience nod and go, “Yep, that’s them.”

🔧 Fix: Keep a tone-of-voice cheatsheet handy. Include do’s, don’ts, key phrases, humour level, and emotional range. Use it like a filter over everything AI creates.

Wrong Move #5. No Fact-Checking & Obvious Hallucinations

Here’s a fun AI party trick: ask it for a stat, and it’ll give you one—confidently, with made-up percentages and a fake citation to boot. It’s not lying. It’s hallucinating. And unless you double-check, your business might accidentally start spreading fiction dressed as authority.

Small biz owners often don’t realise how easily AI invents stuff. Stats, dates, quotes, even URLs—it’ll whip them up like a bad improv actor trying to bluff their way through a trivia night.

And the worst part? It sounds legit.

AI tools don’t (yet) connect directly to live data unless you’ve plugged them into that capability. So unless your prompt includes accurate info, or you manually check everything after the fact, your blog post might be quoting a study that never existed, or referencing legislation that changed five years ago.

This gets risky fast—especially in industries like finance, health, or law, where misinformation isn’t just embarrassing, it’s legally dicey.

🔧 Fix: Always verify stats and quotes. Use reliable sources (think: gov sites, .edu, known publishers). And if in doubt, cut the data and stick to commentary you can back up. Better still? Provide your own experience-driven insight. Real trumps robotic every time.

  1. asting in past emails, posts, or content you’ve written and say, “Talk like this.”
  2. Rewrite everything it gives you so it passes the “could I have said this in real life?” test.

Also: brand voice isn’t just about how something sounds. It’s about what you say, what you don’t, and the turns of phrase that make your audience nod and go, “Yep, that’s them.”

Wrong Move #6. Poor Structure, No SEO & Missing CTAs

You can always spot AI content that’s been left to run wild. It rambles. It repeats. It forgets what it was talking about two paragraphs ago. And worst of all, it usually ends without telling the reader what to do next.

Structure matters, especially for SEO. Google isn’t only scanning your keywords; it’s checking whether your content is clear, skimmable, and actually useful. That means solid headings (H2s and H3s), short paragraphs, bullet points, and a logical flow.

And CTAs, the humble but super important call-to-action. AI often forgets to include one altogether. Or it churns out something robotic like “Click here to learn more” at the bottom of every piece. Helpful? Motivational? Not really.

The fix is simple: write your structure first. Use a rough outline with information on your Intro, Key Points, and CTA. Then ask your AI tool to fill in the gaps within that framework. You can even prompt it to write a CTA that suits your goal: “Help me write a CTA that encourages readers to download my lead magnet on AI content tips.” AI needs guidance and direction, in short it needs strategy.

🔧 Fix: Don’t expect AI to structure your content for you. Use SEO tools (or your brain) to map it out first. Always include a relevant, action-driven CTA that tells your reader what to do with the info you just handed them.

Wrong Move #7. No Testing & No Refinement

AI content might be fast, but fast doesn’t always mean effective. If you’re not measuring what’s working, and what’s falling flat, you’re basically taking stabs in the dark dressed up with fancy fonts.

One of the biggest mistakes small biz owners make? Treating content like a set-and-forget activity. They publish an AI-assisted blog post, share the social tile, and… move on.

No data, no test, no clue whether it actually helped their business.

Here’s the kicker they didn’t see coming: content is only valuable if it moves the needle. That means tracking:

  • How many people saw it
  • What they did next (clicks, time on page, enquiries)
  • Whether it helped hit business goals (like conversions, signups, or sales)

AI can help with optimisation, too, that’s once you’ve got results. Not getting engagement on your email subject lines? Ask AI to suggest five variations. Blog not converting? Feed it the headline and CTA and say, “Make this sharper, more persuasive.”

🔧 Fix: Set one metric per piece of content. Watch it for a month. Then tweak the copy, prompt, or structure, and then test again. AI makes content marketing faster, but only if you’re paying attention to the numbers.

Wrong Move #8. Not Editing The AI-Writing Hallmarks

AI writing has telltale signs, like a poker player whose left eye might twitch every time they bluff. Once you know what to look for, you can spot AI-generated copy a mile away. And if your audience can too? That’s not great for trust.

So what gives something away as being copy and paste AI generated?

  • Overused phrases like “in today’s fast-paced world…” or “unleash your potential”
  • Sentence structures that all feel… the same
  • A lack of specificity—everything is “powerful”, “effective”, “transformational”
  • Conclusions that fizzle into nothing (“In conclusion, AI is useful. Thanks.”)

Your audience is human. They crave personality, realness, and the occasional weird-but-wonderful anecdote. AI isn’t great at that—yet.

🔧 Fix: Read your draft out loud. If it sounds like a LinkedIn post written by a robot with a communications degree, it probably is. Tweak it for rhythm, swap in your quirks, and add something unexpected. A bit of wit or a real-world story goes a long way towards creating connection.

Conclusion Drawn? Use the Robot, Keep the Human

AI isn’t the villain in your content story, but it’s not the hero either. Used well, it’s a time-saver, a brainstorm buddy, and a very solid first-drafter and idea developer. Used badly, it’s a brand-wrecker that’ll make your business sound like every other one out there.

The good news? You’re now across some of the biggest mistakes small business owners make with AI content, and better still you know how to fix them:

  • Start with a clear strategy
  • Give AI smarter prompts
  • Be the human in the loop
  • Protect your brand voice
  • Fact-check everything
  • Structure your content with purpose
  • Measure what matters
  • And watch out for those AI dibber-dobber signs

🔧 Want help applying all this without the overwhelm? Hit me up for a chat. I love working with small business owners on content made easier.

What Topical Authority Actually Is

Topical authority is the opposite kind of metric. You won’t find it in a tool dashboard. There’s no single number Moz or Ahrefs can show you. It’s Google’s internal assessment of how comprehensively and credibly your site covers a specific subject.

The mechanism is structural. Google’s quality systems look at how many meaningful sub-areas of a subject your site has covered, how those pieces of content connect to each other through internal linking, whether the coverage is consistent over time, and whether the content shows evidence of genuine experience and expertise. A site that’s published twenty interconnected articles on one specific subject demonstrates topical authority on that subject in a way no amount of backlink building can replicate.

This is what changed. For years, the SEO playbook treated authority as a single sitewide number you could pump up by acquiring links to your homepage. Today, Google treats authority as topic-specific. You can be highly authoritative on one subject and invisible on a neighbouring one, even on the same domain. That’s why niche-focused sites with low DA scores routinely outrank big-brand sites with high DA, the niche site has built genuine depth on a defined subject, and the big-brand site has spread its content too thin to signal authority anywhere in particular.

For small businesses, this is very good news. Building topical authority on a narrow, well-defined subject is something a one-person business can do. Building the kind of backlink profile that moves DA scores in any meaningful way is not. Topical authority is the more accessible game, and right now it’s also the higher-leverage one.

The Core Difference: One Measures Trust, The Other Measures Coverage

The clearest way to think about the difference is this. Domain authority is a popularity metric. Topical authority is a depth metric.

DA goes up when more sites link to yours. The signal Google might infer from those links is “other people trust this site.” It’s a useful signal but it’s a generic one – links don’t tell Google what your site is actually expert about.

Topical authority goes up when your site demonstrably covers a subject comprehensively. The signal Google infers from cluster structure, internal linking, and consistent E-E-A-T markers is “this site is a legitimate expert on this specific topic.” That’s a much more useful signal for ranking purposes, because Google’s job is to surface the most expert source for any given query – not the most generally popular one.

A site can have high DA and weak topical authority. Plenty of established sites are in exactly this position – they accumulated backlinks over years of doing PR and outreach, but their content sprawls across too many subjects to demonstrate depth in any of them. Their DA looks impressive. Their rankings keep slipping. The reverse is also true: a small business site with a DA in the twenties can genuinely outrank a competitor with a DA in the fifties on topic-specific queries, if the smaller site has built coherent topical depth on a narrow subject.

Why This Matters More Now Than It Did Even Twelve Months Ago

Google’s March 2026 Core Update made the topical authority shift explicit in a way it hadn’t been before. The update reinforced a pattern that had been building since the Helpful Content updates of 2022 through 2024: depth and semantic connection between pages now outweigh raw link count for most small-to-mid niches.

There’s a parallel mechanism working through AI search. When ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Overviews need to cite a source, they don’t rank by DA. They favour sources that demonstrate consistent, structured expertise on a topic. Sites with strong topical authority appear in AI citations far more often than higher-DA sites with shallower coverage. If you’ve ever wondered why some smaller sites keep appearing in AI-generated answers, and others don’t, this is the underlying reason.

What this means in practice is that the lever small businesses have access to: building genuine topical depth on a defined subject, is the same lever that drives both traditional SEO ranking and AI search citation. That’s a rare alignment. The strategy that helps you rank in Google is the strategy that gets you cited by AI search engines, and neither of them cares much about your DA score. The full pillar on using AI to build topical authority walks through the cluster-building strategy in greater detail if you want the implementation roadmap.

Where DA Still Has a Legitimate Role

It’s important I’m being fair here. DA isn’t useless. It’s just been promoted to a status it no longer holds.

For outreach prospecting, DA gives you a fast read on whether a backlink from a particular site is likely to carry meaningful weight. For competitive benchmarking, comparing your DA to direct competitors gives you a rough sense of overall site strength. For tracking the trajectory of your own site over twelve to twenty-four month windows, DA can indicate whether your link profile is growing in a healthy direction.

What DA can’t do is tell you whether your content strategy is building authority where it counts. It can’t tell you whether your cluster architecture is sending the right signals to Google. It can’t predict whether you’ll appear in AI Overviews. It can’t diagnose why traffic is flat despite a rising score. For those questions, you need to look at topical signals – coverage depth, internal linking structure, content freshness, and E-E-A-T markers – none of which appear in a DA dashboard.

The honest take is that DA is a useful sidecar metric, not a primary one. Using it as your headline KPI is like judging a restaurant by how many people walked past it last week. Interesting data point. Not the thing that determines whether the food’s any good.

Frequently Asked Questions

Should I stop checking my domain authority?

No, but stop treating it as your primary success metric. Check it quarterly as a directional indicator for overall site health and link profile growth. Pay attention to topical signals: search query coverage, ranking for cluster keywords, AI search citations, and organic traffic patterns on specific topic areas, for the actual measure of whether your content strategy is working.

Is there a tool that measures topical authority directly?

Not in the way DA is measured. There’s no single score, because topical authority is topic-specific rather than sitewide. The closest proxies are tracking your ranking spread across cluster keywords, measuring how many “people also ask” queries your content surfaces for, and monitoring AI search citations. Some platforms market “topical authority scores” but these are estimates, not Google’s actual internal measure.

Can a small business with low DA outrank big brands with high DA?

Yes, and it happens routinely in niche subjects. A small business that has built a tight, coherent content cluster on a narrow subject can outrank larger sites whose coverage is broad but shallow. The smaller site demonstrates topical depth on the specific query, which is what Google’s quality systems reward. This is one of the few areas where small businesses have a genuine structural advantage over enterprise competitors — and most of them aren’t using it.

The Bottom Line

If you’re spending energy chasing a higher domain authority score and ignoring the structure of your content, you’re optimising for the wrong metric. DA is a third-party estimate of a signal that’s no longer the dominant ranking factor for most small business niches. Topical authority is the actual lever, and it’s one of the few SEO investments that a small business can build with content rather than budget.

The good news is that the strategy isn’t complicated, it’s just specific. If you’d like a structured read on where your existing content is helping or hurting your topical signal, the Content Bottleneck Quiz is a fast diagnostic. From there, the work is mapping the cluster, briefing it well, and protecting the parts only you can write.

For the listeners...

Listen to this as a podcast-style discussion

by Notebook LM AI

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