How to write digital marketing content that doesn't sound like AI

ChatGPT wrote a competitor's blog post last week. I know because the em-dashes gave it away in the first paragraph. I read 3 paragraphs and stopped. Not because the topic was wrong. Because the rhythm told me a human had not edited it.

That rhythm is the AI-tell. The em-dash. The parallel tricolons. The way every paragraph is the same medium length. The hedge openers. Once you can spot them, you cannot un-spot them. Every blog post on your feed reads as either "person wrote this" or "AI wrote this and nobody edited it."

The fix is a 7-step editing pass. Takes 20 to 40 minutes per article. The output reads as human even if AI drafted it. That is the point.

Step 1. Strip the em-dashes

The em-dash and the en-dash used as sentence connectors are the #1 AI-tell. Every LLM has been trained on text where editors love em-dashes. So every LLM uses them everywhere. Sentence connector. Aside marker. List separator. All em-dash.

The replacement is a period, comma, colon, or connecting word. Pick the one that matches the break. Period when the second clause is a new thought. Comma when it continues the first. Colon when the second clause explains the first.

The mechanical pass

Open your draft. Find every em-dash and en-dash. Replace them in order. Read each replacement aloud. 90% of them get a period. The remaining 10% pick whichever feels right when you read it.

Step 2. Vary sentence length

AI rhythm is uniform. Three medium-length sentences in a row, then another three, then another three. Human rhythm bounces. Short. Then medium. Then a longer one that explains why the short one mattered. Then a fragment for punch. Nielsen Norman's eye-tracking research on web reading shows readers scan in bursts, not linearly. Uniform rhythm fights how they actually read.

Read your draft aloud. Where you find three consecutive sentences of similar length, break one. Cut it in half, merge it with the next, or replace it with a fragment.

Step 3. Kill the parallel tricolons

Parallel tricolons are 3-item lists where all three items have the same grammatical shape. "Fast, easy, and reliable." "Built for founders, built for teams, built for scale." "Clear, concise, compelling."

They sound clean. They are an AI-template signature. The fix is to keep the strongest of the three and delete the other two, OR rewrite so the three items are asymmetric.

The asymmetric rewrite

"Fast, easy, and reliable" becomes "Fast. Easy enough that anyone on your team can use it. And it stays up when you need it most." Same three concepts. Different grammatical shapes. Reads human.

Step 4. Hunt and remove hedge openers

Banned phrases. If your draft has any of these, delete them and rewrite the sentence:

• "In today's landscape" / "In an ever-changing world"
• "It is worth noting that" / "It is important to consider"
• "Delve into" / "Dive into"
• "Moreover" / "Furthermore" / "Additionally" (as transitions)
• "In conclusion" / "To summarize"
• "Navigate the complexities"
• "Unlock the potential" / "Game-changer"
• "Robust solution" / "Seamless experience" / "Cutting-edge"

Replace with concrete claims. "In today's landscape, marketing is more competitive than ever" becomes "Meta Q1 2025 CPMs jumped 19.2% year-over-year per Right Side Up's analysis. Your ad budget buys less than it did in 2024." Numbers and specifics replace atmosphere.

Step 5. Specific over abstract

AI drafts in generalities. "Several common mistakes." "Various challenges." "Many businesses struggle with." Replace every general claim with a specific one.

"Several common mistakes" becomes "Five common mistakes we see on every Audit." "Many businesses struggle with attribution" becomes "Roughly 80% of the SMBs we audit have GA4 misconfigured in a way that undercounts their organic channel by 20 to 40%." This is not stylistic preference. Nielsen and Morkes' concise-scannable-objective study found concrete, scannable copy lifted measured usability 124% over the marketese baseline.

Step 6. Opinion over hedge

AI hedges. It says "some agencies feel retainers may not always align with client outcomes." That is four hedges in one sentence ("some," "feel," "may not always," "align with"). Each hedge drains the claim.

The unhedged version: "We don't sell retainers. Retainers trap clients." Two sentences. Zero hedges. A reader knows what you think and can disagree with you. The hedged version, nobody disagrees with because nobody knows what was said.

The opinion-anchor sentence

Every section should close with at least one sentence that takes a position. Not data, not framework, not summary. Opinion. The article reads as "someone thinks something" instead of "here is a topic." That is the difference between editorial and SEO sludge.

Step 7. The founder-voice anchor

The single highest-leverage edit is the founder-voice anchor. Find at least one place per article where you can replace a generic claim with a sentence in first person. "I" or "we." Pulled from your actual experience.

"Marketing audits often surface attribution issues" (generic) becomes "Every Audit I have run in the last 6 months has surfaced an attribution issue. Every single one" (founder voice). Same point. Vastly different signal.

AI cannot draft the founder-voice anchor because it does not know your actual experience. You have to add it manually. One per section is enough. The presence of even one signals to the reader that a human read the draft. That is what de-AI's the piece.

Putting it together: a worked example

Original AI draft sentence: "In today's rapidly evolving landscape, businesses must leverage cutting-edge tools to unlock growth, fast, scalable, and reliable solutions are essential."

Apply the 7 steps. Hedge openers gone. "Leverage," "cutting-edge," "unlock," "essential," all gone. Parallel tricolon ("fast, scalable, reliable") gone. Vary length. Add founder voice.

Result: "Most SMBs are using 2 of the 4 marketing layers properly. The other 2 leak customers and budget. The tools are not the problem. We have audited 50 of these. The pattern repeats."

Same intent, different prose. Reads as human because it is human-edited.

If you want this pass run on your existing site copy and content library before you ship more AI-drafted prose, that's exactly what we do inside an Activation Audit. Same 7-step rubric, applied to the pages and posts your prospects actually read.

Related reads

• How to run a digital marketing audit using AI. The broader framework for which marketing tasks AI should do vs not.
• How to use AI for ad creatives. The same de-AI principle applied to ad copy.
• How to learn AI the right way. For the founder who wants to get good at this instead of outsourcing it.