The statistic on your website might not exist
AI writing tools invent numbers, studies and quotes that sound real. When one lands on a small business website, the business is the one making the claim.
“78% of customers prefer a local supplier.” “Studies show regular servicing extends boiler life by 40%.” “Voted the area’s favourite bakery.”
Plenty of small business websites have a line like that. More and more of them came from an AI writing tool asked to “make the About page more persuasive”. The tool obliged: it produced a number that sounded right, in the place a number usually goes.
Nobody checked whether the study exists. Very often it doesn’t.
Lawyers found out first
The clearest record of what happens next comes from courtrooms.
A public database kept by a legal researcher tracks court and tribunal decisions that deal with AI-generated material, mostly made-up case citations: confident, properly formatted references to cases that never happened. On 25 October 2026 it listed 2,217 decisions. A few involve AI use that was alleged rather than proven, but most are what they look like: professionals who pasted in something that sounded authoritative and didn’t look it up.
Those are people trained to check sources, writing documents a judge will read line by line. A sentence on a small business’s homepage gets far less scrutiny, and that’s exactly why invented claims sit there unnoticed.
It’s spreading in small business too
In July, a figure claiming only 5% of businesses use AI beyond a single chatbot went round social media, shared thousands of times as fact. One writer went looking for where it came from and reported finding nothing: “no study, no survey, no footnote behind it.”
The numbers that do exist are messier. Ask whether a business has “tried AI” and you get one answer. Ask whether it uses AI routinely and you get a much smaller one. A made-up figure skips that mess, which is why it travels so well, and why it reads so naturally in marketing copy.
Why it’s your problem, not the tool’s
When a claim sits on your website, you made it. The software that drafted it isn’t the one advertising.
- In the UK, the advertising code says that before publishing, a business “must hold documentary evidence to prove claims that consumers are likely to regard as objective”, and that a claim can be treated as misleading without it. That covers your own website.
- In the US, the FTC treats making objective claims without a reasonable basis as deceptive. And if your copy says “studies show” or “experts recommend”, the FTC expects you to actually have that level of support.
Nobody is likely to take a florist to court over one sentence. But a competitor can complain, a customer can ask, and a journalist can check. “The AI wrote it” isn’t an answer to any of them.
Then there’s the quieter cost. A reader who spots one invented figure stops believing the rest of the page, including the parts that are true.
The same goes for quotes and awards
Numbers aren’t the only thing these tools make up. Watch for:
- Testimonials that read well but that no customer actually said.
- Awards and rankings: “voted best in town” with no vote behind it.
- Expert quotes: a plausible-sounding person saying a plausible-sounding thing.
- “As featured in” lines naming publications that never featured you.
- Years and counts: “over 500 happy clients” when nobody has counted.
Every one of these is an objective claim. Every one can be checked by someone other than you.
Your real numbers are better anyway
The good news is that you already have better material than anything invented.
“Trading since 2009.” “We serviced 312 boilers last winter.” “Four of us, all trained in-house.” Those are numbers you can stand behind, and readers can feel the difference. A specific, slightly odd figure from a real business beats a round, confident one from nowhere.
The fair question
devkoi writes website copy too. You describe your business in a chat and it drafts the words, so the same risk applies, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.
What devkoi does give you is a way to check. Every change arrives as a preview before anything is published, every earlier version is kept, and changing a sentence takes one message. If you find a claim you can’t back up, getting rid of it is easy.
What it can’t do is know your numbers for you. Only you know how many years you’ve traded or how many jobs you did last month. That part has to come from you.
What to do this week
1. Find every number and claim on your site. Read it as a sceptical stranger would. Look for percentages, “studies show”, awards, counts and quotes. If your site is on devkoi, ask:
“List every number, percentage, award, quote and ‘studies show’ claim on my site, and which page each one is on.”
2. For each one, ask: can I prove it? If you have the evidence (an invoice count, a certificate, a real email from a customer), keep it. If you don’t, it goes.
“Remove the line about 78% of customers preferring local suppliers from the homepage.”
3. Replace invented figures with your own. Years trading, jobs completed, team size, areas covered. Real and checkable.
“Change the About page to say we’ve been trading since 2009 and serviced 312 boilers last winter.”
4. Use only real testimonials, with permission. A customer’s actual words, with their first name and town if they agree. Never “improved” by a tool.
5. If you cite a study, name it. Say who published it and when, so a reader could find it. If you can’t name it, you can’t use it.
6. Make checking a habit. Whenever any tool writes copy for you, read every factual claim before it goes live. With devkoi that’s the preview stage. Nothing is published until you say so.
(General information, not legal advice. Advertising rules differ by country and industry.)
AI writing tools are very good at producing the shape of a fact. Only you can supply the fact itself.
The businesses customers trust will be the ones whose numbers check out. Make sure yours do.