I'll be honest, the first half describes the challenge AI summaries pose and it sounds like a horror show. Here's the set up:

Imagine you want to set up a small charity in your local area. You need to know the costs involved, so you Google ‘how much does it cost to set up a charity UK’. An AI overview appears. It states in plain English that it costs £40 if you apply by post or £13 if you apply online.

Let's be clear about what is happening here. The user is looking for the answer to a fairly simple question. There is a carefully written page on GOV.UK that provides an answer. But instead of linking directly to that page, Google now inserts its AI overview into prime position in its search results. The aim is to provide an answer that likely means the user will never reach that GOV.UK page.

I think you know what comes next. The AI-generated answer is – you guessed it – completely wrong. And not just by a bit. It's miles off.

Since 1 February 2026, the cost to incorporate a company in the UK is £124 if you apply by post or £100 if you apply online - as set out in the Companies House fees guidance.

This kind of misinformation is a huge problem generally, but especially in government where accuracy and trust is so important.

What's the argument for this? It would be that the user is able to get the information they need more quickly, I suppose. One search. An immediate answer. User need met. But that's only if the answer is accurate.

Let's be clear. This kind of misinformation causes harm. It actively affects people's lives in material ways. And for what? Not very much, as far as I can tell.

I recommend reading the whole post by to understand why Google is finding and then sharing the wrong information. It's entirely possible this is happening with key details on your own website too.

What struck me most, apart from the folly of this situation, is the fairly routine approach that the DBT content team are taking. And by routine, I mean it seems to me the response is to content design harder. What else can they (or we) do?

In this case, content design harder means:

• auditing and removing outdated content
• establishing a plan for better maintaining content
• testing a new pattern that tells the user a page is reviewed and up to date, as well as when the next review is due

This is all good stuff! It is great that government departments with big teams and even bigger budgets are taking steps to manage the misinformation posed by AI summaries.

But this is an absolute nightmare for small companies, charities with one content designer if they're lucky, and those organisations with no support at all. It's incredibly difficult for them to find the time and skills needed to spend so much time on existing content.

So what's the plan? I guess we have to hope that eventually AI gets better and governments, companies and charities are able to better manage their content. While in the meantime, we get used to the idea that the information we're shown is incorrect. We learn to trust nothing.

Clear content helps everyone and it's the most important thing you can do to make things accessible. It will help more people than any other accessibility requirement.

Too right.

We can get hung up on how long a service takes to use, but a slightly
longer journey can feel more reassuring for users, and help reduce the
feeling of urgency that fraudsters try to create.

I think it's worth taking this approach with your content too. For years, I would probably advocate for maximum brevity to try and make things as clear and succinct as possible. Over time, I've learnt that actually, a word or two more in a sentence can make all the difference.

You can do a content audit without tools. A spreadsheet, your top 50 pages by traffic, and one sharp question will land most of the decisions an audit exists to make.

I have seen content audits and audit templates that have so many columns and data points. And I think a lot of those data points are next to useless.

A content audit can sometimes turn into the work itself. Slowly, perhaps unnoticed, the act of creating a large and delightfully detailed spreadsheet becomes the point. Months fly by and though the audit looks increasingly splendid, the content and all of its issues remain the same.

Most content audits do not require a many-columned spreadsheet. They need good questions, accurate data and clear actions. In fact, in this piece, Harvey lays out a simple method where an audit requires just one good question.

One question, held steady across 50 pages, produces a defensible pattern. Five questions produce five half-finished audits.

I can get behind this notion. Doing this should give you the most important, effective actions to take to improve your content, most likely in half the time. Sure, your spreadsheet might not look as sweet. But your content will get better, faster.

The antithesis of content design is the old skool Civil Service idea that, if you just try hard enough, you can find “a form of words” that will make everybody happy, nobody sad, and nobody angry.

Or, at least, obfuscate the unpopular policy sufficiently that nobody will realise they should be mad about it.

And then towards the end of the post:

But sometimes, you need to hold the detail back; or disappoint some people to make it clearer for most people; or clearly and directly tell people something they won't want to hear.

It’s rarely easy to balance these, and the many other concerns in the mix. But that’s why the content needs to be designed – not just knocked out, banged together, or scribbled on the back of a napkin.

I think there is also something here about research, constraints and making informed decisions.

You need research to understand who your content is for and how it might affect them, either positively or negatively. But you also have the internal pressure of deadlines and budgets – these are frustrating, but very real content constraints. They too affect your decision making.

As Ray says, this is why many of us call ourselves designers these days and not copywriters. Our choices are based on the situation in front of us. We take all that we know about our users and design the best content we can at any given time.

In my experience, good content design is rarely about finding the ideal 'form of words'. It's about listening, compromise and pragmatism. Writing good content is a messy, movable feast, not a meal to be cooked to perfection.

This resonates:

Three particular terms I often hear being used interchangeably are ‘header’, ‘heading’, and ‘title’; I even catch myself doing it sometimes! Let’s have a look how they can be confused.

And this seems pretty sensible:

What a designer calls something should not differ from what a developer calls it, and the easiest way to ensure this consistency is to use the terminology defined by the super smart people who wrote HTML and ARIA.

If you work in content that lives on the internet, I think you should know the differences and be able to explain them.

Basically:

• header – usually a banner area where a logo, strapline and navigation lives
• title – search-friendly metadata that describes the page and appears in the browser, not the page itself
• headings – the h1, h2, h3 content that helps structure a page and provides an outline of your content

If you're reading this and thinking, "Hmm, still not sure," then I highly recommend you go check out Underhill's post. It includes much more detailed definitions and useful examples to help you out.

I want to point you at these new guidelines on writing NHS messages, which are useful for anyone who writes healthcare content. It covers emails, text messages and paper letters, and includes examples of each.

Fancy some further reading? Here's some GOV.UK advice on sending emails and text messages. And if you work in an area where paper letters are essential, you can learn more about how to write effective letters on GOV.UK too.

It's all straightforward enough. There are only so many hours in the day and Clear Language club is currently a side project to, you know, my actual paying work.

Things I have had to prioritise include:

• recovering from an operation
• a challenging few months of freelance work with NHS England
• making an audio documentary every day for 20-odd days
• going on an actual family holiday

All this is to say that perhaps summer was a bad time to launch – or extend, I suppose – a new project. And I am sorry about that.

With both autumn and indeed winter, I'm afraid, on the horizon, the pace of publishing here should pick up. Starting tomorrow.

Welcome to another edition of the Clear Language Club newsletter. The person sending it to you is me, freelance content designer, Iain Broome.

This was supposed to be with you some time ago, but we had a seemingly never-ending heatwave here in the UK and honestly, I decided to abandon all non-work sitting-at-the-computer time. And now it is, I am told, July.

Anyway, there is lots for you to chew on in the following links to many content goodies. As always, feel free to hit reply and email me back.

Iain

Top 10 Principles for Plain Language

Got to admire the National Archives crew for keeping it simple with these short, to-the-point principles for writing clearly. Old school. Stick 'em on your wall.

Giving pages a clear shape by using headings

A pretty technical explanation on the Intopia blog about how you should be using headings to add structure to your web pages.

Planning and writing text messages and emails

Another dip into the GOV.UK service manual to pick up some tips on planning and writing texts and emails, so that recipents literally get the message.

Exploring the role of AI in our design process at Co-op

Tired of all the AI blog posts? Well, this is a good one because it actually shows a real team (from the Co-op) talking about how they might use AI in real life.

How to create design documentation

From Colin Baird, a helpful post if you and your team are never quite sure who wrote a thing or made an important decision at some point in the past.

Co-designing with people around difficult subject areas

The ace Charley Pothecary, who I am currently working, with has some good, practical suggestions for running inclusive research sessions.

How to access the Readability Guidelines wiki

The Readability Guidelines wiki was a fabulous, free resource for several years. Recently, the project was taken offline and I think that was quite a shame, especially for new folk just joining the content design world.

That's the bad news. Now for the good news.

Lizzie Bruce, who authored the Readability Guidelines wiki for Content Design London, has shared a magic link to an Internet Archive version of the wiki. Hooray! It lives! You'll also find links to other handy resources.

Now, obviously, this means the wiki is kind of stuck in time. But if you want to get some well-researched, reliable guidance on everything from clear language to how people read, you can't go far wrong. This stuff is pretty timeless.

For years we’ve treated documentation like a filing cabinet. Put the thing in the right folder and give it a label. But much as it pains me, people rarely wander through my carefully crafted hierarchy, admiring the taxonomy. They search, skim, follow links. And the second finding information feels like work, they’ve checked out and just asked someone.

I have to say, this was exactly my experience on a recent guidance project. Users would often find the document they wanted and make a direct copy to keep locally. Of course, when guidance was updated, that local copy was soon out of date.

For these users, knowing where to quickly find guidance was important. To heck with the shared folder structure! And for those times where they couldn't find the right guidance document at all, they would simply ask a colleague for the answer.

Needless to say, I learnt a lot from this experience. It's important to organise documents in a clear, sensible way that people can easily navigate. But don't think for a second that users will or want to carefully wander through your folder structure to find what they want.