Jenny Smiechowski

AI helped write a massive percentage of marketing content last year. And now, a lot of brands sound like they were approved by a risk-management committee in a beige coworking space.

You open your website copy, your last three LinkedIn posts, and that email you sent in February that got six unsubscribes and one reply that just said, “interesting.”

You read them back and get this weird feeling: this could have been written by literally anyone.

Somewhere between “let’s use AI to speed things up” and now, a lot of brands have lost their voice—one polished draft at a time.

This usually happens gradually as businesses grow: more freelancers, more approvals, more edits, more pressure to sound polished, elevated, strategic, premium, professional, scalable, luxury-adjacent, founder-led, community-centered, and somehow also universally relatable.

Eventually, the original texture of the brand gets edited out in favor of language nobody could possibly object to—which also means nobody remembers it.

Now half the internet sounds like it was written by the same emotionally stable LinkedIn ghostwriter who uses phrases like “game-changing solution” and “meet people where they are.”

That’s what we’re here to fix.

The 5-Question Brand Voice Audit

Grab something you’ve published in the last 60 days—an email, a sales page, or a LinkedIn post you spent 45 minutes rewriting because “super excited” felt fake, but “excited” felt flat, and “thrilled” felt like you were accepting an Oscar.

Run it through these:

1. The Stranger Test

If someone read this with your name removed, would they know it came from your brand? Or could it belong to literally anyone in your industry with a Canva subscription and a founder story about burnout?

2. The Read-Aloud Test

Read it out loud—yes, actually. Are these things you would really say? If you would never physically say “let’s dive in” or “in today’s fast-paced world,” why are those phrases on your homepage?

3. The Opinion Test

Does this piece have a real point of view? AI copy and over-edited human copy tend to have the same tell: they desperately want everyone to feel included in the conversation. Real brand voices risk being mildly disagreeable from time to time. They interpret the world in a certain way, prioritize certain beliefs over others, and say things competitors wouldn’t necessarily put on a conference slide next to a stock photo of two people laughing at a laptop.

4. The Specificity Test

Are there details only your brand would use? Your strange metaphors, your oddly specific observations, your references, your stories. Specificity is what makes people feel like a human wrote this instead of a customer service chatbot that’s really trying its best.

5. The Energy Test

Does this sound like you when you’re actually lit up about something? Or does it sound like you after the fourth round of edits, when someone asked you to “make it sound a little more professional” and your soul briefly left your body?

Three or more “no” answers, and your voice has drifted.

What To Do About It

Your voice probably isn’t gone. It’s just buried under layers of:

• “make it punchier”
• “maybe soften this”
• “can we sound a little more luxe?”
• “this feels too casual”
• “would a more aspirational tone resonate better with our audience?”

Your real voice is usually hiding somewhere much less polished. It’s in the voice memo where you finally explained the thing clearly after twenty minutes of being polite. It’s in the rant you went on during a Zoom call that suddenly made everyone understand the actual problem. It’s in the sentence you almost deleted because it sounded “too much like you.”

And to be clear: this doesn’t mean you have to stop using AI. But there’s a difference between using AI as a tool and publishing the first thing it gives you like it descended from the mountain carrying stone tablets.

Use the tools. Speed things up. Let them organize the bones. Then go back in and add the parts a machine would never invent:

• the weird analogy
• the oddly specific observation
• the sentence you almost deleted because it felt too honest
• the opinion your competitors would never say out loud

Because in a world where polished content is infinite, a recognizable voice becomes one of the few things people actually remember.