When a client says your draft sounds like AI

You wrote it. You know you wrote it. Then the note comes back: “This reads a bit AI.” The useful move is not to prove authorship. It is to find the sentence that made the client stop hearing you, and fix that sentence before the next call.

Updated 21 October 2026

What the note usually means

Clients rarely point at a word. They point at a feeling: the draft is smooth, correct and somehow airless. In our reading of writer communities, the same few shapes come up again and again:

• A wind-up before the point. “Here's the thing”, “What matters is”, “The truth is”. The sentence clears its throat, then says something simple.
• A balanced contrast. “Not just a newsletter, but a conversation.” The second half repeats the first with a louder noun.
• An adjective where a detail should be. “A seamless experience” tells the reader nothing they can see, touch or remember.
• Four sentences with the same breath. The paragraph is even, careful, and has no pulse.

None of these prove a machine wrote the draft. They are simply the places where a reader stops hearing a person. That is a smaller and more fixable problem.

A client-ready workflow

1. Check one paragraph first. Do not paste the whole deliverable. Pick the opening, the section the client quoted, or the paragraph you rewrote last. The checker marks the sentences that carry the habits and gives a reason for each.
2. Fix the reason, not the synonym. If the flag is a wind-up, cut the wind-up. If it is a balanced contrast, say the thing once. If it is an adjective, replace it with a fact from the brief.
3. Read it aloud. The ear catches the metronome a checklist misses. If every sentence takes the same breath, change one. Do not change all of them; that is how a draft becomes flat in a different way.
4. Keep the version that sounds like you. A client hired a writer, not a syntax cleaner. The goal is not “passes a tool”; the goal is “the person who wrote this is still in the room”.

What not to do

• Do not lead with a detector score. A percentage is not evidence of authorship, and arguing about one moves the conversation away from the writing.
• Do not strip every contraction and aside. The small asymmetries are often what makes the copy sound like a person. Remove the empty sentence, not the human one.
• Do not rewrite the whole piece to satisfy one note. Fix the flagged passage, then read the next paragraph. Over-correcting is how a strong draft turns into a polite one.

What the checker will and will not do

The free check marks the sentences that carry the shapes above and explains each mark in a line. The opening rewrite gives you a plainer version of the first 300 words so you can hear the difference. The full rewrite handles up to 1,000 words once you sign in.

It will not tell you whether a machine wrote the text, and it will not give you a score to send a client. No tool can honestly do the first, and the second would only move the argument. It also does not store your draft.

If the client keeps pushing back

Ask which sentence felt off and what they expected instead. “It reads like AI” is a feeling; “the second paragraph sounds like a brochure” is a note you can work with. If the answer is still a number from a detector, bring the conversation back to the brief, the audience and the line that made them pause. You can also point them to how the check works and why we do not score authorship.

More for writers: copywriters and client edits · writing in English as a second language · all guides