AI slop isn't an output problem. It's an input problem.
Every ecommerce brand using AI to churn out product descriptions, category pages, and blog posts is feeding the same publicly available information back into the same models and expecting differentiated results. That's not a content strategy. That's a copy machine pointed at Google's top 10 results.
The brands winning on organic search AND in AI-generated answers (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Amazon Rufus) share one thing: they're creating content that contains information no one else has. Proprietary data. Real customer language. Founder stories. Product development context. Category expertise that lives in their team's heads.
This SOP shows you how to extract that information systematically and turn it into content that performs — without sounding like it was written by a committee of robots.
Before you publish anything, run it through these three questions. If you fail any one of them, it's slop.
Test 1: Does it contain information gain? Could someone have written this by reading the top 5 Google results? If yes — slop. Your content needs to add something that doesn't exist anywhere else. A proprietary stat. A real customer quote. An opinion your brand actually holds. A comparison your team has done internally.
Test 2: Does it sound like your brand? Read it aloud. Does it sound like your founder wrote it? Like your best social media post? Like the email your head of CX sends to unhappy customers? If it sounds like a press release from a company with no personality — slop. Ecommerce brands with strong voices (think: Gymshark early days, Oatly, Liquid Death) are winning because their content has a recognisable fingerprint. AI can replicate that fingerprint once you've defined it. It cannot create it.
Test 3: Is it actually readable? LLMs and humans both reward content that's easy to digest. If your product description uses "utilise" instead of "use," sounds like a legal brief, or has a subheading called "The Reality Check" — slop. Write at a level your actual customer reads at. For most ecommerce brands, that's casual, direct, and benefit-led.
This is the work most brands skip. It's why their AI content is garbage.
What it is: A one-pager that captures how your brand talks. Not a 40-page brand guidelines PDF nobody reads. One page.
How to build it: