How to Tell If Your Content Sounds Like Everyone Else's
I run this check on every piece of copy before it ships, mine or someone else's on my team. It takes four minutes. I call it the swap test. If you can swap in a competitor's name and the sentence still works, you haven't written anything yet. That's the whole method, and most people who ask me how to make content sound different are relieved it's this simple.
This comes from running content for a DTC brand I scaled from $100K to $3M in revenue. We were publishing three blog posts a week at one point. Most of them read like they'd been written by the same five brands in our category. Because, functionally, they had been.
What the problem actually looks like
You can spot it without even reading closely. Look for these:
- The headline promises something "ultimate" or "complete"
- The intro has a sentence like "in order to succeed, you need to understand"
- Every claim is stated with zero number attached to it
- There's a sentence that says "it's important to note that"
- Nobody in the piece ever disagrees with anything
- You could delete any paragraph and the post would still make sense
That last one is the real tell. Generic content has no load-bearing sentences. Every paragraph is decoration. You could reorder the whole piece and nothing would break, because nothing in it depended on anything specific.
I see this most in company blogs, LinkedIn posts, and email newsletters written under deadline pressure. The writer knows the topic. They just didn't have time to say anything about it.
Why it happens
Writers default to the safest possible sentence under time pressure. Specific claims take longer to write because you have to defend them. "Our approach works" takes five seconds. "We cut our CAC from $42 to $28 over six months by cutting two ad channels" takes longer, because now you need to actually remember the number, or go check it.
There's also a mimicry effect. If you've read fifty posts in your category before writing your own, your brain quietly assembles the average sentence from all fifty. That average sentence is, by definition, generic. Nobody sets out to write the average. It happens because the inputs are all similar and the brain takes the path of least resistance.
AI tools make this worse now, not because AI can't be specific, but because the default output without a real prompt and real inputs is also an average. Ask a model to "write about email marketing best practices" and you'll get the same sentences that show up on three hundred other sites. The tool isn't the problem. Feeding it nothing specific is the problem.
What we do about it
Here's the actual procedure I run, on my own writing and anyone else's:
- Run the swap test. Replace your brand name, your product, your industry term with a competitor's. If the sentence survives unchanged, cut it or rewrite it.
- Count your numbers. A genuinely useful 1,000-word post should have at least three to five concrete specifics: a dollar figure, a percentage, a timeframe, a named tool. If you have zero, you've written an opinion piece pretending to be advice.
- Find the one sentence a competitor would disagree with. If every sentence in your post would get a nod from every company in your space, you haven't taken a position. Somewhere in a useful piece, someone should be able to say "I don't think that's right."
- Read it out loud. Generic phrasing sounds fine in your head and stilted out loud. "Leveraging synergies to drive growth" sounds like a real sentence silently. Said aloud, it sounds like nothing.
- Cut the throat-clearing. Any sentence that exists to tell the reader what you're about to tell them gets deleted. "In this post, we'll explore" is a sentence doing zero work.
The cost here is real. Running this check on every post slows you down. On the infrastructure project I marketed, a $2.2B job with a $10M marketing budget, we had comms staff who wanted to push press releases out same-day. Adding a specificity pass meant a half-day delay, sometimes a full day if we had to go find the actual number instead of writing "significant investment." We did it anyway, because a vague press release got ignored by trade press and a specific one got picked up.
The most common mistake
People try to fix generic content by making it longer, or by adding adjectives. More adjectives don't fix vagueness. "Incredibly effective strategy" is still not a specific claim, it's just a louder version of the same empty one. The fix is always a number, a name, a date, or a disagreement. Volume and enthusiasm are not substitutes for specificity.
What it costs to ignore
On the DTC brand, we A/B tested two versions of the same product page copy. One version used generic benefit language: "premium quality, built to last." The other used specifics: "stitched with a 1,200-denier nylon thread rated for 40lb loads." The specific version converted 22% higher over a four-week test. Same product, same price, same traffic source.
Generic content also compounds badly in search. Google's systems are explicitly built to reward pages that say something a dozen other pages don't already say. A post that reads like everyone else's competes against everyone else's for the same rankings, and usually loses to whoever published first or has more domain authority. A specific post competes against almost nothing, because nobody else wrote that particular sentence.
The quieter cost is trust. Readers who've been burned by generic advice before can smell it fast now. If your first three paragraphs are safe and vague, a meaningful share of readers leave before you get to the one true thing you actually know.
FAQ
How long should this audit take per post?
Four to six minutes for a 1,000-word post once you've done it a few times. You're not rewriting, you're scanning for the specific failure patterns listed above and flagging them.
Can AI-written content pass this test?
Yes, if you feed it specifics first. Give the model your real numbers, your actual process, your disagreement with the common advice. The output stops sounding average the moment the input stops being average.
Run the swap test on your next post before you hit publish. If a competitor's name fits cleanly into your sentences, you're not done writing yet.