I asked AI to differentiate 4 coaching businesses. What it said will surprise you...
Aug 20, 2026A lot of marketing coaches say things like "AI makes you sound the same as everyone else." An opinion. Is it true? Well, I decided to test it and the results were surprising!
Here's the experiment I ran:
I took three coaches - page one of Google, strong testimonials, genuinely successful women - and copied their own descriptions of their businesses straight off their websites.
Then I added a fourth. Mine.
I gave each one to an AI and asked the same prompt, word for word:
How could I differentiate myself in this market?
I went in expecting to catch it out. I expected bog-standard advice, the kind you could get from any business book published since 1997.
That's not what happened.
First: the advice was actually pretty good
It spotted that one coach's martial arts background sat unusually well beside her MBA - a genuine observation about an uncommon combination.
It noticed another was quietly anti-hustle in a market obsessed with performance, and suggested she lean into it rather than hide it.
For my own business it offered a phrase - "the misalignment tax" - that I actually rather like. The idea that you pay a real cost, in lost revenue and wasted effort, when your good positioning is attached to the wrong offer is exactly what I teach.
So let's be clear. This isn't a story about AI being stupid.
It's a story about what happens when four different businesses ask the same question and get the same answer wearing four different outfits.
Then I put the four responses side by side
Every single one recommended the same five moves.
One. Coin a proprietary name for your method. Two. Narrow your audience. Three. Add a metaphor. Four. Lean on your credentials. Five. Contrast yourself against "surface-level" competitors.
Four different women. Four different fields. One playbook.
And it got specific enough to be uncomfortable. Here's the contrast line it wrote for the first coach:
"Most executive coaches give you a new planner. I rewrite the subconscious operating system that makes you procrastinate."
And for the third:
"Traditional coaching fixes your calendar. I re-engineer your identity."
That's basically the same sentence. Two women who have never met, handed the same rhetorical move, neither knowing the other received it.
If all four of us followed the advice, we would end up with four trademarked frameworks, four narrowed audiences, and four versions of "most coaches do X, I do Y."
More fluff. Less difference.
The bit that actually matters: AI didn't pick up the positioning problem
Here's what none of the four answers did.
All three of those coaches offer life coaching and executive coaching and career coaching. Same person. Three different markets, three different buyers, three different problems.
That's the most obvious positioning problem on their websites. You can see it in about four seconds.
Not one of them was told to fix it.
The AI narrowed who they talk to. It never once touched what they sell.
And that gap - between who you talk to and what you actually sell - is the whole thing. It's the difference between a niche and a truly differentiated position, and almost nobody separates them properly.
So what's the difference between your niche and your positioning?
Your niche is the crossover of what you do and who you serve.
Leadership coaching for mid-career women in tech. Nutrition for endurance athletes. Bookkeeping for creative agencies.
It's a targeting decision. It tells the market who you're for. Most of us did this work years ago, and many of us have refined it half a dozen times since.
Your positioning is the reason someone chooses YOU over the other people serving exactly the same niche.
And here's the part that gets misunderstood by the vast majority of marketing experts: this differentiation doesn't live in your words. It lives in your offer.
The shape of what you sell. Your way of achieving the solution. How it's structured, what it costs, the path you take to the outcome your buyer wants.
You can rewrite your bio forty times. If the offer underneath is the same shape as everyone else's, dressed up with a different name and extra bonus, you haven't moved.
Why the old "I help X with Y so they can Z" isn't enough
Try this now. It takes ten seconds.
Take the sentence most of us were taught to write:
"I help [who] with [problem] so they can [result]."
Read yours back. Then read it again as though you were a buyer, comparing you with three other people who do roughly what you do.
It tells them who you're for, what you promise.
It tells them nothing about why you.
That's not a messaging problem you can fix with better words. It's a positioning problem, and it's the reason the marketing has to work so hard.
The cost of leaving it at the base level of niche
This is the part people vastly underestimate, so I want to be precise about it.
When the market can't tell you apart, every single client has to be convinced individually. One call. One post. One nurture sequence. One "let me explain what makes my approach different" conversation, over and over.
That convincing is your marketing workload.
It isn't a content problem. It isn't a consistency problem. It isn't that you haven't found the right platform or posted at the right time.
It's the cost of being interchangeable, paid weekly, forever.
And it compounds in three ways:
You compete on price. When two options look the same, price becomes the deciding factor. Not because your buyer is cheap, but because you've given her nothing else to decide on.
You attract the wrong people. A broad position pulls in everyone vaguely nearby, which means more discovery calls, more mismatches, more work for less yield.
You can't build leverage. Everything depends on you personally explaining the difference, so nothing scales - not your content, not your referrals, not your reputation.
The tell is simple. If your marketing stops the moment you stop, you're not positioned. You're persuading.
Positioning is a subtraction exercise that AI isn't designed for
Here's where the AI experiment gets genuinely interesting.
Every answer it gave - to all four businesses - was to add something.
Add a name. Add a framework. Add a metaphor. Add an angle. Add a diagnostic tool.
For my business alone, it suggested five new things: a new category to own, a new concept to coin, a new scorecard to build, and two new analogies. Five additions to a business I have spent the past year deliberately simplifying.
But positioning isn't an addition exercise. Instead you're required to subtract.
Being known for one thing means deciding what you're not. What you'll stop saying. Which clients you'll turn down. What you'll leave off the page even though you're good at it and it took you years to learn.
A generative tool isn't designed to do that. Asking it what to remove is like asking it to produce less - the one thing it can't do. So it hands you more tasks, more ideas, more confident opinions.
Which is exactly how you end up with a business that does life coaching and executive coaching and career coaching, and a homepage that has to work incredibly hard to hold all three together.
Three things AI genuinely can't do here
It can't see your market. It's working entirely from your description of yourself. It has no view of the twelve other people your buyer is weighing you against, so it can't tell you what's genuinely unoccupied.
It can't tell you what to give up. Every trade-off - the clients you'll stop taking, the service you'll retire, the thing you'll stop being known for - is a decision with consequences. It has no stake in the outcome, so it never has to be right.
It takes your self-description at face value. You tell it you're differentiated, and it agrees, then hands your position back to you with more confidence than you had to begin with. It doesn't just fail to spot the problem. It confirms you don't have one.
Full disclosure: it caught me out too!
I should own up about something.
My own About page said, until this week: "Most coaches will hand you their framework and ask you to fit your business into it. I do the opposite."
That's the same move as the AI said to do! Number five on the list. The exact one I've spent this article describing.
When I tested my own blurb, the AI flagged it as an issue:
"Many coaches claim they don't use templates, so simply saying 'I do the opposite' isn't enough."
It was right. That's a claim, not a difference. Anyone can say they 'do the opposite'.
So I changed the page. It now says what I actually do instead of what I'm supposedly not: I don't push you into a framework that gives you a business mirrored on my own. We build yours to suit you.
Which is, I suppose, the point. The test is whether you can show it, not whether you can say it.
Where to start
If you want to know whether you have a positioning problem, don't ask AI. It's the one question it's structurally unable to answer about you.
Ask instead:
Could a buyer explain the difference between me and my closest competitor, in one sentence, without using the word "passionate"?
If the answer is no, that's your bottleneck!
And it's worth fixing before you build anything else - because positioning is the domino piece. Once it's right, the offer becomes obvious, the messaging almost writes itself, and demand stops depending on how much you post.
If you'd like the benefit of external eyes on your positioning
I have a Positioning Review for exactly this reason.
You send me three links: your website, your main offer, and wherever you show up most.
I go through them the way a buyer would, spotting where they're leaning in and where they're being repelled, or simply confused! Then I send you a private video with what's working, what's stopping people choosing you, and what I'd change or remove first.
It's the one thing neither you nor your AI can do for yourself, because it needs someone standing outside your business looking in.
A single strategy session with me is $590. The review is the same analysis, recorded instead of live, so you can watch it back whenever you like.
It's only $99, on an introductory rate.
Jessica Osborn is a positioning strategist for female coaches and experts with over 25 years business building experience. She hosts She's The Business Podcast.