You have probably tried an AI writing tool by now, and noticed two things. It is fast, and it is confidently wrong more often than you would like. Now plugins and website builders are adding AI features everywhere, and you are wondering which of them would actually help your customers and which would just add risk.
This guide looks at four places AI can earn its keep on your own website: search, product and service descriptions, support answers, and image alt text. For each one, it covers what to check by hand, and at the end, what you should not hand over to a machine at all.
1. Smarter on-site search
The default WordPress search matches the words a visitor types against the words in your pages. It works, but it is literal. Someone types “sofa” and your product is called “three-seater couch”. Someone misspells a brand name. Someone types a question, such as “something for dry skin under 500”, and gets nothing.
AI-assisted search tries to match meaning rather than exact words. Depending on the tool, it can handle synonyms, spelling mistakes and plain-language questions, and some can rank results by what visitors actually click. For a shop with a large catalogue, or a service business with many pages, this can make a real difference to whether people find what they came for.
Before you add anything, check:
- Is your normal search actually working? If search returns nothing or the wrong page, there may be a plain technical fault first. Our guide to WordPress search not working walks through the checks.
- Where is your content sent? Many AI search tools copy your catalogue to their own servers to index it. That is usually fine for public product data, but read what they store and where.
- Does it slow the site? Test page speed and search speed before and after, on a phone.
- Can you control results? You should be able to pin products to the top for important searches and hide items that are out of stock.
Try your own top twenty searches after setup. If the results are worse for any of them, the tool needs tuning before you leave it on.
2. Writing product and service descriptions with AI
This is where most businesses start, and it is genuinely useful. A shop with hundreds of products that each have one line of text, or a service site where every page reads like a list of keywords, can get a decent first draft for every item in an afternoon.
The word that matters is draft. An AI tool does not know your products. It knows what products like yours usually say. That gap causes four predictable problems, and someone has to check for each one.
Facts
AI tools fill gaps with plausible details. Give one a product name and a photo, and it may add a material, a size, a warranty or a “handmade” claim that is not true. Every measurement, material, ingredient, compatibility note and care instruction has to be checked against the real product or the supplier’s specification. For anything sold to consumers, a wrong fact is not only embarrassing. It can lead to returns and complaints.
Duplicate text across a catalogue
Ask an AI tool to describe forty similar T-shirts and you will get forty descriptions that say nearly the same thing in nearly the same order. That reads badly to shoppers and gives search engines little reason to treat each page as distinct. Feed the tool what is actually different about each product, such as fabric, fit, print and occasion, and read a batch side by side before publishing.
Brand voice
Unedited AI copy has a recognisable sound: lots of “elevate”, “perfect for”, “timeless” and “versatile”. If your shop talks to customers plainly, the descriptions should too. Write a short note on how you speak, with a few of your own good descriptions as examples, and give it to the tool every time. Then edit the output so it sounds like you.
No made-up claims
Watch for claims you cannot back up: “best quality”, “clinically proven”, “eco-friendly”, “lasts for years”, “loved by customers”. These are easy for AI to add and hard for you to defend. Health, safety, environmental and comparison claims need particular care. If you would not say it to a customer’s face with the product in your hand, delete it.
A workable routine: give the tool the real specifications, generate a draft, have a person who knows the product check every fact, edit for voice, and only then publish. Do it in batches of ten or twenty, not the whole catalogue at once.
3. AI help with support questions
You do not need a full chatbot to use AI for support. Some of the most useful setups are behind the scenes: a tool that drafts replies to customer emails or contact form messages for a person to check and send, or one that suggests the right help article while a customer is typing a question.
If you do want a chatbot answering visitors directly, we have covered that separately. See our page on AI chatbots for small business websites, and our comparison of chatbots and live chat.
Whichever way you use AI for support, the same rule applies: it can only answer as well as the information you give it. If your shipping policy, return rules and opening hours are vague or out of date on your site, the AI will repeat that vagueness. Fix the source pages first.
4. Image alt text
Alt text is the short description attached to an image. Screen readers read it aloud for visitors who cannot see the image, and search engines use it to understand what the image shows. Most small business sites have thousands of images with empty alt text, because nobody had time to write it.
AI tools can describe images and fill in alt text in bulk, and that is a reasonable use. Check a sample, though. AI descriptions tend to be generic (“a person standing in a room”) or overly long, and they do not know context. A photo of your team at a client site should say that, not “group of people smiling”. Purely decorative images, such as background patterns, should have empty alt text rather than a description. Google’s own guidance on images in search explains how it uses alt text.
Privacy: what leaves your website
Most AI tools send data to an outside service to process it. For product descriptions and alt text, that data is your own public content, which carries little risk. For search and support it can include what visitors type, and visitors type all sorts of things: names, phone numbers, order numbers, sometimes health or money details.
Before you switch on any AI feature that touches visitor input, find out where that input goes, whether it is stored, for how long, and whether it is used to train the provider’s models. Then make sure your privacy policy says so. Our article on chatbot data privacy goes through the questions to ask, and they apply to AI search and support tools just as much.
What not to automate
- Prices, stock and offers. These should come from your store’s own data, never from AI-written text.
- Legal and policy pages. Terms, privacy policy, refund rules and anything regulatory need a person, and often a professional, to write or approve them.
- Publishing without review. Do not let any tool write straight to live pages. Drafts first, always.
- Refunds, complaints and disputes. An unhappy customer needs a person who can make a decision.
- Anything about health, safety or regulated products. The cost of a wrong sentence is too high.
- Reviews and testimonials. Never generate them. They must come from real customers.
Where to start
If you only do one thing, start with descriptions or alt text, because the content is yours, the risk is low, and you can check every word before it goes live. Add AI search or support help once your basic content is accurate.
We do not have a fixed package for AI tools on websites. If you want help choosing one, setting it up on WordPress or checking what it does with your data, tell us what you need and we will give you an honest answer about whether it is worth doing.
Next in this series: Voice Search for Local Businesses: What to Fix First
