Why brand voice drifts, and what a useful check looks for
Brand voice drifts as soon as more than one person writes for a company. A founder writes the homepage, a contractor writes the blog, someone in sales writes the outbound emails, and a chatbot drafts the social posts. Each of them reads the brand guide once, if at all. Six months later the website sounds like four companies.
The usual fix is a style guide, and most style guides are too vague to check against. "Confident, warm, and clear" describes almost every brand. A reviewer can't hold a sentence up against "warm" and say whether it passes. So the review comes down to whoever has the best ear, usually the founder or the head of marketing, and that person becomes the bottleneck for everything the company publishes.
A useful brand check works from rules that a draft either keeps or breaks:
- the words and phrases your company never uses, such as "seamless" or "game-changing"
- the two to four points your company keeps coming back to in its messaging
- the limits on tone, such as no exclamation marks, no pressure to buy now, or no comparisons with named competitors
- the product facts every claim has to match, such as what the product does, what it costs, and how long setup takes.
Checking against rules like these is work an AI marketer does well. It reads every draft with the same attention, it doesn't get tired on the fortieth social post, and it can explain exactly which rule a sentence broke.
Kite is an AI marketer. It researches your business, builds a growth strategy, and ships the work that brings you new customers. Here's how it keeps your content on-brand.
How Kite checks content against your brand guidelines
Kite starts by writing your brand down as rules it can check. It reads your existing brand guide if you have one, along with your website, your customer reviews, and the drafts you've approved or rejected in the past. It records your tone, your messaging pillars, the words you use, and the things you never say in your team's knowledge base, along with your colors, fonts, and logo.
From then on, every draft Kite writes goes through a review pass before you see it. Kite reads the draft against your limits, checks that every product fact traces back to a source, and makes sure the strongest proof you have is in the piece. Then it reads the draft the way a stranger would and removes the patterns that make copy sound generated.
Kite runs the same check on copy your team wrote, whether it's a blog draft in Google Docs, a PDF someone uploaded, or a page already live on your website. When you correct Kite's work, it records the correction as a rule for later drafts, so your brand rules get more specific the longer you work together.
- Turn your brand guide into rules a draft can be checked against
- Check every draft before it goes out
- Can AI review copy your team wrote?
- Check the facts and claims, not only the tone
- Keep different voices for different people, channels, and clients
- Turn each correction into a rule for next time
Turn your brand guide into rules a draft can be checked against
Kite's brand check is only as good as the rules behind it, so the first job is writing those rules down concretely. Kite reads every source of your brand you can give it and records what it finds on your brand voice page, with a note on where each rule came from.
Your own documents come first. If you hand Kite a brand guide, it quotes the guide's rules and cites the document. If your company publishes a brand or press page with a guide and logo files, Kite treats that as your guide too. Your website comes second, as a check on what you actually do. When your guide says one thing and your homepage does another, the guide wins, and Kite tells you about the disagreement instead of quietly picking a side. A guide that bans "best-in-class" while your pricing page uses it twice is worth knowing about.
When there's no guide, Kite builds one from what you've already published. It measures your copy's reading level, sentence length, formality, and humor from real quotes, and it finds the phrases you keep repeating. It can also build a voice guide from your best customer reviews and your strongest ad headlines, or write a style guide from the drafts your founder approved and rejected.
The brand voice page ends up holding:
- your tone, described with examples from your own copy
- the two to four messaging pillars your company keeps returning to
- the words and phrases your company uses
- what your sources say you never do in copy, such as banned words, pressure, urgency, or comparisons, each recorded exactly as the source states it.
Kite keeps the limits as narrow as your sources make them. "No hard sell" rules out a guilt-trip ending, but it still allows one honest line about what waiting costs. "No urgency" rules out that line as well. Kite doesn't invent limits from your general tone, because a rule you never set would cost you lines you wanted.
Check every draft before it goes out
Every customer-facing draft Kite writes goes through the same review pass before it comes back to you. That covers website pages, blog posts, emails, social posts, ads, and reports. The pass runs in a fixed order, and the brand check comes first.
Kite starts with what you've already told it. It reads the draft against your brand voice page and the brief, and it checks four things:
- Your limits. Any banned word, forbidden phrase, or tone your guide rules out gets replaced with the strongest line that keeps the rule. Kite changes the approach of the sentence rather than draining the energy out of it.
- Your best proof. The strongest proof Kite knows about, such as a named customer's words or a measured result, belongs in the piece where proof fits. If it doesn't fit, Kite tells you why.
- Your facts. Every product fact in the draft has to trace back to your knowledge base, the brief, your own website, or a document you shared. A specific with no source is replaced with the nearest true one or marked as a gap for you to fill.
- Your quotes. A customer's words stay exactly as they said them. Kite edits the copy around a quote, never the quote itself.
Next, Kite reads the draft cold, as a stranger meeting it in an inbox or a feed. It checks that the headline makes sense without context, that the ending gives the reader what the piece promised, and that the call to action offers what the reader wants by that point. Last, it rereads the whole draft and asks what makes it sound machine-made, then fixes things like stacked em dashes, forced lists of three, and puffed-up words such as "pivotal" and "vibrant."
Kite also protects what's already working. It changes a line only when it can name what the original costs the reader, such as trust or clarity. A sharp, unusual line that keeps your rules stays, even if a blander version would feel safer.
Can AI review copy your team wrote?
Yes. Kite runs the same check on copy written by your teammates, contractors, and agencies, and what it hands back depends on what you ask for.
- Ask for a review. Kite returns each problem quoted from the draft, with the exact fix, ranked by importance. It leaves the writer's text alone, so they can decide what to change.
- Ask for a polish or a rewrite. Kite returns the revised copy with the problems fixed in place and names each meaningful change in one line, so you can see what moved and why. The writer's wording stays wherever it works.
You can share the draft in whatever form it's in. Upload a PDF or a text file in the Kite web app, share it in Slack, or point Kite at a page on your website. With Google Docs connected, Kite can find the draft by name and read it there. With Google Drive connected, it can leave comments on the draft that quote the sentences needing work, such as a headline that uses a banned word or a statistic with no source, so the writer sees the notes where they already work.
Say a contractor delivers a blog post that opens with "In today's fast-paced digital landscape" and calls your product "seamless" three times. Your guide bans "seamless" and asks for openings that start with the reader's problem. Kite quotes each instance, suggests a replacement drawn from your own copy, and rewrites the opening around the problem your customers describe in their reviews.
Kite can also check drafts as they arrive. You can ask it to look in a Google Drive folder, such as "Ready for review," every morning and review whatever is new since its last check.
Check the facts and claims, not only the tone
An off-brand claim does more damage than an off-brand word, so Kite checks what a draft says as well as how it sounds. A product fact is anything a customer could check and call wrong: what the product does, how it's set up, what it costs, what's included, how long something takes, or how many people use it.
Kite checks each of these against your knowledge base, which holds your positioning, products, and pricing from its research and from what your team has told it. If a draft says setup takes five minutes and your onboarding page says thirty, Kite flags it. If a draft quotes a customer count your company has decided not to publish, Kite treats that as a limit and rewrites the line around a different point.
Kite also checks the verbs. If your product recommends and your team decides, a draft that says your product "decides" for the customer has changed a product fact, even if every word is on-brand.
Keep different voices for different people, channels, and clients
One brand often needs more than one voice, and Kite keeps them separate. Your brand voice page can hold different rules for different audiences or channels, such as a more formal register for enterprise buyers and a looser one on social media. Kite checks each draft against the rules for the place it's going.
Content published under a person's name follows that person's voice. Kite can build a voice profile for your founder or an executive from samples of their writing, then write and check their LinkedIn posts against it, so the posts sound like them and not like the company blog.
Agencies can keep each client separate. One person can belong to several Kite teams and switch between them, and each team keeps its own research, brand voice page, and settings. A draft for one client gets checked against that client's rules, never against another client's.
Turn each correction into a rule for next time
When you correct a draft, Kite treats the correction as information about your brand. If you tell Kite you never call customers "users," or that you liked how a post opened with a number, it records that as a proposed rule. Once Kite's nightly review confirms it, the rule guides later work for your whole team, for one client, or for one kind of content, such as email.
A decision you've made stays made. If you keep a line Kite flagged, or overrule one of its suggestions, Kite doesn't flag the same thing again on that piece. Over time your brand voice page fills in with the rules your team actually cares about, and you spend less time giving the same notes.
What you get
A brand voice page
Your tone, messaging pillars, preferred words, and limits, each with the source it came from, recorded in your team's knowledge base.
A list of where your guide and your website disagree
Kite reports the places your published copy breaks your own guide, so you can decide which one to change.
Reviewed drafts
Every draft Kite writes comes back already checked against your rules and facts, with a short list of anything you need to decide, such as a claim to confirm or a gap to fill.
Reviews of your team's copy
Each problem quoted with its fix and ranked, or a polished version with every meaningful change named, depending on what you asked for.
Comments where your team works
With Google Drive connected, Kite's notes appear as comments on the draft itself.
Rules that grow with your corrections
The notes you give Kite become rules for later drafts, scoped to your whole team, one client, or one kind of content.
How to get started
You can work with Kite in the Kite web app or in Slack. Start by giving it your brand guide, if you have one, and asking it to set up your brand voice. You might say, "Here's our brand guide. Use it to set up our brand voice and tell me where our website doesn't follow it." Or, without a guide: "Write up our brand voice from our website and our best customer reviews."
Kite already knows a lot about your brand from the research it does when you sign up, including your website copy, your colors, fonts, and logo, and your positioning. It reads your guide, records the rules on your brand voice page, and sends you a summary with the disagreements it found. Correct anything that's wrong, and Kite updates the page.
Then hand Kite something to check. Upload a draft, share a link, or ask it to review the newest post in a Google Doc. You don't need to connect anything for Kite to review a file you upload or a page on your website. Connect Google Docs or Google Drive when you want Kite to find drafts on its own and leave its notes where your team writes. Connect Figma when your designers keep the official colors and type there.
Kite asks for your approval before it publishes anything, so every reviewed draft comes to you first. If you want Kite to publish checked work on its own, you can give it more autonomy.
Integrations used to check content against your brand guidelines
Kite's brand research, brand voice page, and review pass are built in, so you can start checking content without connecting anything. Connect the products where your guide and your drafts live when you want Kite to read them directly and leave its notes there.
Read your brand guide and your team's drafts
Kite finds and reads your brand guide and the draft being checked, then fixes what's off directly in the doc or writes its revision into a copy or a new tab so you can compare.
Kite reads brand guides and drafts stored as PDFs, Docs, or Slides, leaves comments on a teammate's draft that quote the sentences needing work, and can check a review folder on a schedule.
Common questions
Can AI really tell whether something sounds on-brand?
Yes, when the brand is written down as specific rules. An AI can reliably spot a banned word, a claim that contradicts your pricing page, a missing proof point, or an exclamation mark your guide rules out. It's much less reliable against a guide that only says "be bold and human," because there's nothing concrete to check. That's why Kite's first step is turning your guide into concrete rules with examples from your own copy.
Will Kite make AI-written drafts sound less like AI?
Yes. The last step of Kite's review pass is a reread that asks what makes the draft sound machine-made. Kite removes the common giveaways, such as em dashes used for drama, forced groups of three, "not just X, it's Y" sentences, filler phrases, and inflated words like "pivotal" and "testament." It applies the same check to drafts your team wrote with other AI tools.
Will Kite rewrite lines that were already fine?
No. Kite changes a line only when it can name what the original costs the reader, such as clarity or trust. When the replacement would only be safer or more conventional, the original stays. In a review, Kite leaves your text alone entirely and lists its suggestions for you to accept or reject.
Can Kite check pages that are already live on our website?
Yes. Point Kite at a page or a set of pages, and it reads them against your brand voice page and your product facts, then lists the lines that break your rules with a suggested fix for each. If Kite hosts your website, or your site runs on a CMS Kite can update, it can make the approved fixes and publish them once you approve.
What should a brand style guide include so it can be checked?
A checkable style guide names the words you never use, the phrases and points you return to, the tone limits you hold to, and the product facts that must stay accurate, with a real example of each from your own copy. If you're building one from scratch, the guide Brand voice examples and how to keep every writer on-brand Coming soon shows what good ones look like.