Most marketing copy is bad in the same way. It hedges across every possible audience, names features instead of taking a stance, and treats the homepage as a checklist rather than an argument. The headlines are interchangeable. You could swap them between competitors and nobody would notice.
The good stuff is rare and obvious when you see it. It says something specific. It picks an audience and trusts them. It uses real verbs. It doesn't reach for “empower” or “unlock” or “transform” because the writer actually knew what the product did. You finish reading the H1 and you know — concretely — what you'd be using this thing for and who it's for.
That's the central question I bring to every piece of copy: does this brand have a stance, or is it an inventory? An inventory of features stacked into a headline. An inventory of audiences glued together with “or.” An inventory of category clichés performing the role of a marketing page rather than saying anything.
A stance is the opposite. It commits. It picks a fight, even a small one. It admits there's a kind of person this product is for and trusts that person to find their way in.
Vague headlines are a tax on the reader. They make people work to figure out what's being sold. They erode trust in proportion to how long it takes to understand what's happening on the page. Every second a reader spends decoding “the AI workspace that works for you” is a second they're deciding to leave.
Here are the specific things I notice.
I notice “with confidence” attached to verbs that should stand on their own. Manage with confidence. Build with confidence. Scale with confidence. Cut “with confidence” from any of those and the sentence is exactly as strong, often stronger. The phrase is doing nothing — it's a hedge for a verb the writer didn't quite trust. If the verb is right, it stands. If it isn't, “with confidence” can't save it.
I notice the “or” headline. “For developers or designers or product teams.” “For startups or enterprises or the in-between.” “For students, professionals, or anyone in between.” This is a brand admitting it hasn't decided who it's for and trying to make that into a feature. The cost of picking is losing the audiences you didn't pick. The cost of not picking is losing all of them, slower.
I notice when a brand uses internal jargon and asks the reader to translate it. I find myself asking whether the average reader actually knows what the brand just said. “Badge at zero.” “Best-in-class observability.” “Composable infrastructure for the modern stack.” If the reader has to look up what you mean, they will probably just leave. A headline that requires translation is a headline that doesn't trust its own audience.
I notice “agentic” and “AI-native” being used as a substitute for explaining what the thing actually does. Mentioning AI more than once on a homepage is a yellow flag; more than three times is a confession. The pattern is the same: the brand is hoping that proximity to a buzzword does the work the actual product description should do.
I notice the weasel verbs.Empower. Unlock. Unleash. Supercharge. Transform. Reimagine. These show up when the writer didn't know what the verb actually was, and reached for the most generically positive thing they could think of. They tell you nothing about what the product does. Replace any of them with the literal action (“manage your team's invoices” instead of “empower your team”) and the headline immediately gets stronger.
I notice when a brand has chosen a confident, weird voice and then watered it down for the homepage out of nervousness. The blog has a real perspective. The social account has personality. The homepage reads like it was approved by twelve people who all wanted to add their feature. Voice that only appears on the lower-stakes surfaces is a costume.
What I don't care about: em dashes (they're a tool, not a tell), sentence fragments when they punch, length when it lands. A precise twelve-word headline beats a punchy four-word one that means nothing. Stance isn't tone — a quiet, restrained brand can have a sharp position, and a loud, weird one can have nothing to say.
What I care about most: does the headline tell me what this product literally does, and who it's for? That's the bar. If the answer is no, no amount of clever phrasing rescues it. If the answer is yes, the rest is style, and most style choices are forgivable.
The good homepage is the one that picks a fight. The good headline is the one that admits something specific about who would use the product. The good subhead earns the headline by getting concrete. The good description trusts the reader to draw their own conclusions instead of beating them over the head with benefits.
The bad homepage is the one that's afraid to commit. Afraid to lose the reader who isn't quite the target. Afraid to be wrong. Afraid that being specific means losing somebody — when the actual cost of vagueness is losing everybody.
This is the lens BrandDuel is built around. Real homepages, real headlines, judged on whether they took a position or filed a category submission.
Most don't. The ones that do are worth paying attention to.