Writing Service Pages With AI That Are Still Yours

Why this matters

Ask a chat assistant for a garage door spring replacement page and you get a competent page in under a minute. It is also the same page every other shop in your area got: "trusted local experts", "fast, reliable service", "satisfaction guaranteed". Worse, it will usually contain things that are not true of you, because the tool fills gaps with whatever a typical service page says, and a typical page offers 24/7 service and a lifetime warranty. A page that is generic does not bring calls. A page that makes promises you do not keep brings the wrong calls and, in some cases, a deceptive-advertising problem with your name on it.

The fix is to reverse the order. Facts first, written by you from your own records. Then the draft, built only from those facts. Then an edit that puts back the two things a tool cannot supply: local proof and the way you actually talk.

The fact sheet is the page before it has sentences

Everything the page may say goes on one sheet before the tool sees anything. Here is the one a six-person garage door shop filled in for its spring replacement page:

SERVICE   Torsion and extension spring replacement
INCLUDES  Springs replaced as a pair; cables and
          rollers inspected; door balance set;
          opener force and reversal re-tested
EXCLUDES  Panel repair, opener replacement (quoted
          separately)
TIME      Most visits 60 to 90 min on site
AREA      Westfield, Garner, Holly Ridge, north
          Ashby. Not south of the river.
PRICE     Flat rate per pair, quoted by phone
          after three questions
WARRANTY  Our written terms: springs 3 yr, labor
          1 yr (see warranty sheet)
HOURS     Mon to Sat, 7 to 6. No overnight calls.
PROOF     612 spring jobs in the last 12 months
          (job report, pulled in March). Most
          local doors: 1990s builds, one spring.
LICENSE   [number here if your state requires it]
SAFETY    Leave the door where it is. Keep kids
          and pets clear. Don't pull the release
          cord with the door open.
VOICE     Short sentences. "We", not "our team".
          Never "premier" or "top-rated".

The town names and figures are this shop's; yours come from your records. Every line on that sheet is something the owner could show a customer evidence for. That is the test for whether a line belongs.

Step 1: Fill the sheet from records, not memory

Pull the job count from your field software, the warranty terms from the warranty document you actually hand customers, the service area from where your trucks went last year. Memory rounds everything in your favor: "we do a ton of these" becomes a number nobody can check, and "we cover the whole county" becomes a promise to drive somewhere you lose money going.

Why it matters: the sheet is the only thing standing between the page and the tool's idea of a typical shop. What breaks if you skip it: you are editing the tool's facts instead of supplying yours, and you will miss some.

Step 2: Put the safety and limits on the sheet, not just the selling points

The sheet above has a SAFETY line and an EXCLUDES line. Both earn their place on the page. A homeowner searching "garage door spring broke" at 7 a.m. needs to be told not to try lifting the door, because a spring under tension, or a door with no spring holding it, is how people get hurt. Saying so plainly is also the strongest trust signal on the page: it reads as someone who has seen it go wrong.

The exclusions keep the page from selling what you do not do. "Opener replacement quoted separately" stops a customer arriving with the belief that the spring price covers a new opener.

Step 3: Give the tool the sheet and a short, strict instruction

Paste the sheet and ask for the page with three rules: use only facts on the sheet; do not add any service, guarantee, credential, hour or area that is not listed; follow the VOICE line. Ask it to list at the end any sentence that goes beyond the sheet.

Do not paste a competitor's page in as an example to imitate. The tool follows an example closely, so you inherit its structure, its phrasing and its claims, none of which are yours, and the words belong to whoever wrote them. If you like how another page is organized, describe the organization in your own words ("open with the safety line, then what is included, then the towns") and leave their text out.

Why the list: it sometimes works and it is cheap to ask. Do not rely on it. A tool asked to flag its own additions misses some, for the same reason it made them: it is producing plausible text, not tracking where each fact came from. See related: What a Language Model Is Actually Doing When It Answers.

Step 4: Check every claim in the draft against the sheet

Print the draft and mark each sentence that states a fact. Then find that fact on the sheet. If it is not there, it comes out or it gets verified and added to the sheet.

The garage door shop's draft was about 640 words. It listed two additions at the end. A line-by-line check against the sheet found seven:

• "Lifetime warranty on all springs." The written terms say 3 years.
• "24/7 emergency service." The shop works Monday to Saturday, 7 to 6.
• "Certified technicians." Certified by whom? Nobody could name a body.
• "Serving the entire metro area." The sheet excludes south of the river.
• "High-cycle springs installed as standard." Offered on request only.
• "Same-day service, guaranteed." Usual, not guaranteed.
• "Family-owned since 1985." The shop opened in 2009.

The tool flagged two of the seven. The other five read exactly like true sentences. Each one would have generated a specific bad call: someone at 2 a.m., someone south of the river, someone holding the page and asking for their lifetime warranty.

Step 5: Check the remaining claims are ones you can prove

What survives Step 4 is still advertising, and advertising claims carry legal weight. At the federal level the FTC Act prohibits deceptive advertising, and the FTC expects an objective claim (a warranty term, a response time, a job count) to be backed by evidence you hold when you make it. State consumer protection laws add their own layer, and some states attach specific rules: contractors in California and Florida, for example, must show their state license number in advertising. Whether your trade and state carry that duty is a question for your licensing board, which is why the sheet has a LICENSE line. This is not legal advice; where a claim is one you are unsure you can stand behind, the safe edit is to take it out.

For the spring page, the evidence file was short: the warranty document, the job report showing 612 spring jobs, and the service-area list. Each objective claim on the final page points at one of them.

Step 6: Edit for local proof

Generic pages describe the service. Pages that get calls describe the service here. Replace each general sentence with something only a local shop could write:

• "We repair all types of garage door springs" became "Most doors in Westfield and Garner were built in the 1990s with a single torsion spring. We replace it with a matched pair so the door lifts evenly."
• "Fast, reliable service" became "612 spring jobs last year, most finished in 60 to 90 minutes."
• "We serve your area" became the four town names and the one place they do not go.

Why it matters: local detail is the part no competitor's AI draft contains, because it came from your job records, not from the open web. What breaks if you skip it: the page is interchangeable with every other shop's, and so is the call it produces, if any.

Step 7: Edit for voice by reading it aloud

Read the page out loud as if you were saying it to a customer in their driveway. Strike every phrase you would not say. The garage door owner cut "premier", "seamless", "peace of mind" and "we pride ourselves", changed "our team of professionals" to "we", and broke three long sentences in half. He also added one line he says on every call: "If the door is down and the car is inside, call us before you try anything."

Why aloud: your ear catches a voice that is not yours faster than your eye does. What breaks if you skip it: the page sounds like a brochure, and a customer who calls and hears you sounds like a different company.

Step 8: Date the sheet and keep it with the page

Save the fact sheet beside the page with the date it was written. When a fact changes, such as a new town, a different warranty, or new hours, change the sheet first and the page second. Review both once a year, or when the job count or service area changes enough to make a line untrue.

What the finished page looked like, by the numbers

The final spring page came in at about 480 words against the 640 of the draft. Seven unsupported claims were removed, four town names were added, one safety paragraph went near the top, and every objective claim traced to a document in the evidence file. It took the owner about 50 minutes: 20 on the sheet, 2 on the draft, about 15 checking claims, and about 13 on the two edits. Most of that time is the sheet, and the sheet is reusable; the opener replacement page took 25 minutes because half the sheet carried over.

What would change the approach. If your page is the only one in a thin local market, a plain accurate page may be enough and the voice edit matters less. If you work in a licensed trade with advertising rules, Step 5 moves to the front: settle what the board requires on every ad before drafting anything. And if a service is one you rarely do, do not write a page for it at all; a page invites the call.

References

• FTC Act, Section 5 (deceptive advertising) and the FTC's advertising substantiation policy
• Your state contractor licensing board's advertising rules
• See related: What a Language Model Is Actually Doing When It Answers
• See related: The Verify-Before-You-Send Rule for AI Output
• See related: Edited Photos, Generated Images, and Honest Job Documentation