Why AI-built WordPress sites look the same, and what the demo reads

WordPress has more themes than any other platform. AI tools still pull sites toward the middle.

• AI assistants in page builders generate sections from a short prompt, and the same prompt produces the same hero, service cards and testimonial strip for a dentist and a law firm.
• Pattern and template libraries. Prebuilt sections save hours, and the most popular ones appear on a great many sites.
• Business-generic copy: “Quality service you can trust”, “Your satisfaction is our priority”. Written to fit any business, so it fits none in particular.
• Stock photography chosen with the same keywords.

WordPress gives you full control over all of it. The work is in using that control.

IntentGrid rewrites the visible text a visitor reads: headlines, body copy, service descriptions and button labels, written for how they arrived (traffic source, campaign, approximate city, device, language, local time). It adapts your existing copy, and brand names, prices, dates and numbers stay as written.

There is no IntentGrid plugin today. It does not touch your theme, blocks, page builder or database, and it never changes WooCommerce prices or product data. It does not change design, and it is not a traffic source.

The working part today is a demo that renders a rewritten copy of any public page in a sandbox on intentgrid.ai; adaptation on your own domain is early access, set up per site by hand. How it works explains what runs where.

WordPress builds each page in PHP on the server, so the demo receives the rendered page with its copy in place, whatever theme or page builder produced it. Scripts are stripped, so sliders, pop-ups, cookie banners and anything a plugin builds with JavaScript will not appear in the preview.

Two practical snags. Security plugins and firewalls sometimes block automated requests, in which case the demo cannot fetch the page at all and shows an error. And a maintenance or coming-soon mode serves that placeholder to everyone who is not logged in, the demo included.

Most WordPress sites sit behind full-page caching, from a plugin, the host or a CDN. That is good for speed, and it means the first version of a page that gets cached is the one everyone receives. A template that swaps the headline based on a campaign parameter will often seem to work while you are logged in, because logged-in users usually bypass the cache, and then show one cached variant to everyone else.

If you hand-roll it, make sure the cache varies on the parameter you use, or do the swap in the browser and accept that crawlers see the default. On-domain adaptation with IntentGrid is early access and set up by hand, per site, and caching is one of the things that setup has to account for.

Same layout, same prices, same claims. Every version uses only what the original page already says: in this made-up case, office delivery before 9am and wedding-cake tastings.

Most of these need nothing new installed.

• Rewrite the hero and the service descriptions in your own words, starting from something a customer actually asked you.
• Set your own colours and fonts in the theme's global styles or the page builder's site settings, instead of the template's.
• Delete one stock section. A testimonial strip with no real testimonials in it is a good first candidate.
• Replace stock photos with your own, even phone photos. Real beats polished.
• Write a title and meta description for each important page, with an SEO plugin if your theme does not expose them.
• Check every change logged out, so you see what visitors and the page cache see.

Why AI-built sites converge on the same defaults is covered in why vibe coded websites look the same.