How to spot an AI-generated website

There is nothing wrong with using AI to draft a website. We use it. The problem is the sites that get published exactly as the machine wrote them, with nobody checking whether any of it is true.

You have probably landed on one without noticing. It looked professional. It said all the right things. And when you tried to work out who was actually behind it, there was nothing to find. That gap matters if you are about to pay a deposit, book a tradesperson or hand over a card number.

Here is what to look for, split into three groups: how it reads, how it looks, and what it fails to tell you.

The writing tells

Language models have habits. Once you know them you cannot stop seeing them.

• The em-dash used as a bracket. "Our team — passionate about design — delivers results." One in a paragraph is fine writing. Two in a sentence, on every sentence, is a machine.
• The "not just X, it's Y" flip. "Not just a website, but a partnership." "More than a shop, it's a community." It sounds profound and means nothing.
• Everything in threes. Fast, simple and reliable. Design, build and launch. Real people write in twos and fours as well.
• The buzzword set: seamless, elevate, unlock, empower, robust, cutting-edge, streamline, harness, transform. Any two together is a bad sign.
• Paragraphs that restate the heading. The heading says "Why choose us", the paragraph says "There are many reasons to choose us", and then it stops.
• No specifics. No street names, no prices, no dates, no numbers that could ever be wrong. Vagueness is what you get when the writer has no facts to work from.

The last one is the real test. Human copy about a plumbing business mentions boilers, call-out fees and which towns are covered. Generated copy talks about quality service and customer satisfaction because it does not know anything else.

The design tells

AI builders reach for the same handful of layouts, so the sites all share a silhouette.

• A big hero, then three cards, then three more cards, then three more. Scroll and the page keeps repeating the same shape with different words in it.
• Emoji doing the job of icons. Rockets, sparkles, lightbulbs and target boards down the side of a bullet list.
• Gradient text on the headline, frosted glass panels behind everything, and a purple-to-blue colour scheme nobody chose.
• Stock photos of smiling people in an office that is not their office. Reverse-image-search one of them.
• Not a single photo of the actual shop, van, workshop or finished job.
• Icons that do not match each other, because they were pulled from four different sets.

None of these is damning on its own. A small business can have a decent template site and stock photography and still be completely legitimate. It is the combination, and what happens when you go looking for evidence.

The trust tells

This is the group that actually costs people money.

• Statistics with no denominator. "Trusted by hundreds of businesses." Hundreds of which businesses? Named where?
• Reviews with a first name and a last initial, no photo, no link to anywhere the review can be checked, and all five stars.
• A discount that never expires. If the banner said 30% off six months ago and still says it today, it is not a discount, it is the price.
• A countdown timer that resets when you refresh the page.
• No address, no company number, no named human anywhere on the site.
• A contact form that goes nowhere. This one is easy to test and it is the fastest way to find out whether anybody is home.

A generated site can fake polish in an afternoon. It cannot fake a company number, a real address and a reply to your email.

A two-minute check

Before you send money to anyone you found through a website, run these. It takes less time than reading the about page.

• Copy the headline, paste it into Google inside quote marks. If the same sentence appears on forty other businesses, it came from a template.
• If it claims to be a limited company, look the name up on Companies House. It is free. Check the address matches and the company is not dissolved.
• Reverse-image-search one photo of a person and one photo of the work.
• Look for a named human. A real business will tell you who runs it.
• Send a specific question through the contact form, something that needs a real answer. Silence for a week tells you everything.
• Check the domain age with a WHOIS lookup. A site claiming fifteen years of experience on a domain registered in March is worth a second look.

Why it matters even when the site is genuine

Most generated sites are not scams. They belong to real businesses that bought the cheapest option and got what they paid for. It still costs them.

Google has spent the last few years pushing down pages written to fill space rather than answer a question. A site made of generic copy tends to sit outside the results for the searches that would actually bring work in, which is one of the reasons covered in why is my website not showing up on Google.

The bigger cost is the customer comparing three quotes. Two of the sites talk about quality and passion. The third has photos of last month's job, a price range, and the name of the person who will turn up. That third one wins, and it did not win on design. The gap between those two kinds of site is the whole subject of cheap vs premium website.