Why AI alone won't fix your funnel (and what it's actually good for)
The wave of AI-powered CRO tools is coming. Most will be useless. Here's where AI genuinely helps in conversion work, and where it's a liability.
In 12 months you'll be able to paste a URL into a tool and get a 40-page conversion audit in four minutes. It will be mostly correct. It will also be almost completely useless. Here's why — and where AI actually earns its keep in this work.
What AI is genuinely good at in CRO
Three places:
- Pattern matching across sessions — "find me the 20 replays where users scrolled to pricing then left"
- Copy variant generation at volume — give me 15 headline variants in three voice registers
- Objection classification — reading chat transcripts and categorising the blocker
Each gets a concrete example with a prompt you can actually use.
What AI is bad at (and will stay bad at for a while)
- Judgement calls on which fix to prioritise — requires business context the model doesn't have
- Spotting absence — the missing trust signal, the moment the flow should ask but doesn't
- Implementation in your actual codebase — can write a snippet, can't reason about your CMS, framework, auth
- Accountability — nobody fires ChatGPT when the fix doesn't work
Each gets a specific failure mode I've watched happen.
The commoditisation that's coming
Cheap audits will be a commodity within 12–18 months. The models are already close. What won't commoditise: implementation, accountability, taste. The consultants who survive will be the ones who were always selling those three things anyway.
How we use AI in teardowns (honestly)
I use Claude daily. Here's where: reading session replays in aggregate, drafting fix copy I then edit, rubber-ducking whether a hypothesis has legs. I don't use it to decide what to ship. That's the judgement part, and it's the part I'm paid for.
The question to ask a CRO consultant in 2026
"If I could get this audit from an LLM in four minutes, what am I paying you for?" If they can't answer in one sentence, don't hire them. My answer: implementation, accountability, and the judgement call of which three fixes to ship out of thirty candidates.
Takeaways
Three bullets. Core message: AI raises the floor of what cheap audits look like. It doesn't raise the ceiling of what real ones do.
Skip the AI-generated PDF. Book a Teardown — £1,500. Real analysis, real fixes, real accountability.