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As of 11 August 2026, AI can write a cover letter.
Most people should do this themselves; the prompt is on this page.
Can you do it?
5 minutesto a draft.
15 minutesto something you’d act on.
Cost, all in£0
Skill needednone
Who has to check ityou
What the alternative costsA professional CV-writing service charges £50–£150 per letter.
If this goes wrong: the letter reads as generic and the recruiter skims past it; you lose one application, not the job hunt.
What to actually do
Do it yourself
The route this page recommends
A chat interface, no skill needed, and roughly 15 minutes until you can act on the result.
Prompt
Write a one-page cover letter for the attached job description. Use my CV below for facts — invent nothing. Plain tone, no adjectives about myself I could not defend in an interview, and open with why this company specifically.
Open it prefilled in ChatGPT or Claude, or copy it into Gemini, which takes no prefill link.
Use a tool built for this
Second choiceHand it to a person
The distant thirdA person who owns the outcome does this end to end, worth it when the failure is dear.
Where to find a person today
National Careers Service
The government’s free careers service: professional advisers give free advice on cover letters and applications.
A careers adviser gives free feedback on your letter, which beats paying for a task AI plus your own checking already carries.
What it gets wrong
- Invents achievements when the CV is thin, so every claim needs checking against your actual history.
- Defaults to a breathless tone that reads as AI-written; the prompt pins it down but drift returns on regeneration.
- Cannot know the company beyond its public surface: the "why this company" line needs your one true sentence.
Even on a YES, the friction has a name: taste.
How we scored this
Five axes, each scored nought to two by hand: ten means AI carries the task cleanly, and the thresholds that turn a total into YES, PARTLY or NO are published in the methodology. Each axis name links to its definition.
| Axis | Score (0–2) |
|---|---|
| Output | 2 |
| Inputs | 2 |
| Verification | 2 |
| Liability | 2 |
| Effort delta | 2 |
| Total | 10 / 10 |
The methodology and its thresholds are published in full.
FAQ
- Can ChatGPT write a good cover letter?
- Yes, and this is one of the tasks AI genuinely carries: our 11 August 2026 test scored it 10/10 on our methodology. The catch is facts. It invents achievements when the CV is thin, so give it your CV and check every claim before sending.
- Will recruiters know my cover letter was written by AI?
- Only if you let the default voice through. Unprompted, the tone is breathless and reads as AI-written. Pin it down: plain tone, no adjectives you could not defend in an interview, and one true sentence about why this company. That last line has to be yours.
- Is it free to write a cover letter with AI?
- Yes. A free chat interface is enough for this task; no paid tool earns a place on this answer. The human alternative, a professional CV-writing service, charges £50 to £150 per letter.
- How long does it take to write a cover letter with AI?
- About five minutes to a first draft, and roughly fifteen minutes to a letter you have checked and would actually send. The checking is the real work: verify every factual claim against your own history before it goes out.
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