The AI Persuasiveness Analyst skill for Claude

You recognise the problem the skill solves by the question you ask yourself after hitting send: why is nobody replying? The text was neat, the spelling was correct, the offer was good. But neat is not persuasive. Most commercial copy fails not on language but on psychology: there is no proof in it that others already trust you, there is no reason to reply now rather than next month, and the core message is buried in paragraph three. Those are not style errors, they are missing principles, and you can only find them by looking systematically.

That systematic approach is the core of the file. It runs through Cialdini's seven principles, the six pillars of Made to Stick and Kahneman's layers of thinking, and ticks off per principle whether it is demonstrably in the text. Demonstrably means here, literally: with a direct quote from your text as proof, or a short explanation of why it is missing. By its own description it works for landing pages, cold emails, sales emails and nurture flows, adverts on Meta, Google and LinkedIn, pitches and one pagers, whitepaper introductions, social posts with a commercial goal, and quotes.

It belongs in the skill library NL that we make freely available from the AI and automation service, with no account and no sales email afterwards. For marketers, copywriters and business owners who do not want to guess why a text does or does not work.

There is proof, but of the wrong kind. The email leans entirely on authority: ten years of experience, ISO certified. That is one of the seven principles, and it is the principle that is about you. Social proof, the principle that is about people like the reader, is completely missing. When in doubt, people look at what similar people did, not at what you say about yourself.

Nothing sticks. Held up against the six pillars of Made to Stick, the email falls flat: the core message only appears in paragraph three, the opening is predictable, the promise of more results is not concrete, and there is no emotion and no story in it. The Heath brothers keep asking the same question: does this stick or not. With this email, not.

There is no reason to reply now. The Kahneman layer looks at what the text does to fast, intuitive thinking. Here: not much. No anchor value that colours the rest of the numbers, no loss framing. The email only promises gain, and according to Prospect Theory people react more strongly to what they stand to lose than to what they might gain. A text that only promises gain misses the urgency that loss framing provides.

The rewrite in the example shows how small the change can be. Note: the new sentence is an example sentence from the file that shows how you add principles, not a measurement from us or from a real client. The numbers in it are the kind of proof you have to pull from your own records.

After that comes the process, seven steps in fixed order. Read the text in full. Classify the goal: inform, sell, recruit or persuade a decision. Determine the audience and the use case if they are supplied, and ask if they are not. Run through the three frameworks in order: Cialdini, Heath, Kahneman. Calculate the persuasiveness score based on how many principles are present, weighted for relevance to the goal. Write the rewrites with the weakest part first. And close with a final conclusion in two sentences.

The strictest part of the file is the rules for the analysis. Always quote the original text with every observation. Never invent principles that are not there: if social proof is missing, just say so. Do not give style tips such as shorter sentences or an active voice, unless they directly touch a psychological principle. When in doubt, refer back to the source. Deliver a rewrite even if the score is already high, because there is always room to improve. Write the analysis in Dutch unless the original text is English. And always write AI in capital letters.

The file closes with a worked example of a full analysis, the report you saw shortened in FIG.01, and a source list of four titles: Cialdini, the Heath brothers, Kahneman, and the original Prospect Theory paper by Tversky and Kahneman. If you want to learn to build an instruction file like this yourself, the full method is in writing SKILL.md NL.

The influence comes from Robert Cialdini. The expanded 2021 edition of Influence is used, with seven principles: reciprocity, consistency, social proof, liking, authority, scarcity and unity. Each principle describes a fixed route by which people arrive at yes, and the check is simple: is that route demonstrably in your text or not. Note what the skill does not do: it does not teach you to apply the principles in a conversation or campaign, it tests whether they are in a text.

The stickiness comes from Chip and Dan Heath. Made to Stick from 2007 answers a different question than Cialdini: not why people say yes, but why some messages stick and others evaporate. The six pillars, from Simple to Stories, form the second block of every report.

The thinking comes from Daniel Kahneman. Thinking, Fast and Slow from 2011 describes the two layers in which people think: the fast, intuitive System 1 and the slow, rational System 2. A text that only speaks to System 2 asks effort from the reader, and effort is the enemy of conversion. That is why it checks for the shortcuts that do speak to System 1: anchoring, framing, availability and familiar words.

The loss framing comes from Tversky and Kahneman together. Prospect Theory from 1979 showed that people react more strongly to loss than to gain. Hence the separate test: is there loss aversion in the text, or is only gain promised? It is the most commonly missed lever in commercial copy, and at the same time the lever you have to handle most carefully, because manufactured urgency falls apart under scrutiny.

If you want to work on the structure of the argument after the analysis, you can continue with two neighbours from the library: the Pyramid Principle Writer skill for the order of the argument, and the SCQA Communication Coach skill NL for the tension arc of your opening. This analyst tells you what is missing; those two help you fill the gap.

After that, using it is simple: paste the text and ask why it does or does not work. Add the goal and the audience if you know them, because the weighting of the score depends on it; if they are missing, the skill asks for them. If you are new to files like this, the knowledge base has the wider explanation of working with AI.

There are also limits. You will not get style advice here: spelling, rhythm and tone are editing work, and that is not what you come to a psychological analyst for. It does not predict conversion: the score measures how many principles are demonstrably in the text, not how many people will click tomorrow, because that also depends on your offer, your price and your audience. And it does not turn a bad offer into a good one. If nobody wants your service, that is not down to a lack of loss framing.

The most honest limit sits in how you use the outcome. What gets exposed here are persuasion levers, and you can pull those the wrong way too: inventing scarcity that is not there, claiming proof you do not have. Do not do that, and the skill will not help you with it: it points out where a principle is missing, but the real proof has to come from your own records. The texts before and after in the chain have their own skills: the SPIN Sales Conversation NL for the conversation where you gather the arguments, and the Negotiator for the conversation that follows your persuasive proposal.

A more persuasive text raises the odds that a reader acts, but there have to be readers in the first place. If too little traffic reaches your pages, the real work ahead of this analysis is: being found by the people you are looking for. The free SEO scan shows in a few seconds where your site stands. In the guide writing models compared you can see how this model relates to the others. And if you want to talk through what else AI can do for your business, from single skills to full automation, we simply do that in a conversation.