We build with AI every day, which means we know its default handwriting better than most. So let us be clear about the irony up front: the tells below are not evidence that AI touched a site. They are evidence that no human held a bar afterward. Those are different problems, and only the second one matters.
Here is what we look for when we open a site and something feels off, and what the presence of a bar looks like by contrast.
The visual tells
- The blue-to-violet gradient. The single most reliable signature there is. Left unprompted, generation tools reach for indigo like it is a house style.
- Every card the same size. A grid of six identical tiles is a layout nobody made a decision about. Human layouts have hierarchy: one thing is deliberately bigger because someone decided it mattered most.
- Default Inter and a framework favicon. The typeface nobody chose, and the build tool's logo still sitting in the browser tab.
- Pure white pages and pure black sections. Considered design warms its surfaces and lifts its darks; untouched output ships both extremes straight from the default palette.
- The incomplete grid. Three tiles on top and one orphan underneath is a rectangle nobody cared enough to finish.
There is also the skeleton tell: hero, three feature cards, stats band, testimonials, footer, in that order, on every page of every one of these sites. Bento grids everywhere, all identical, none featured. The pattern is not wrong because it is common. It is wrong because nothing about it was chosen for this particular business. A template does not know what the business's strongest asset is, so it treats everything as equally important, which is the same as treating everything as unimportant.
The copy tells
Copy is where the mask slips fastest, and the famous tell is the em-dash. AI-flavored copy is riddled with them, several to a paragraph, doing jobs a comma or a colon does better. We ban them from body copy outright, and on some builds the ban is enforced by the build itself: a copy linter fails the compile if one sneaks in.
The second tell is the round number. 100% satisfaction. 50+ projects. Real businesses have oddly specific numbers because reality is oddly specific: 893 CMS items migrated, 466 URLs accepted, 112 product pages. When every stat on a page is round, every stat on the page is a guess.
And then the invented testimonials: five first-name-only quotes in identical cadence, everyone thrilled, nobody real. If a site fabricates its social proof, assume it fabricates everything else too.
The imagery tells
The stock desk photo: a laptop, a latte, a team laughing at a whiteboard. None of it is the business's actual work, and visitors feel that even when they cannot name it. The tell inside the tell is repetition, the same photo on three different cards, because nobody actually looked at the finished page.
Isometric cartoon illustrations are the same signal in a different costume. A contractor's website does not need a floating purple figure watering a lightbulb. It needs a photograph of the crew doing the work, which is exactly the asset a template pipeline never has.
The details that separate expert work
Flip every tell over and you get the craft. What reads as expert is not one big move. It is the accumulation of small details that a template pipeline gets wrong and a human with standards gets right.
- A real founder photo and real in-situ work photography, every image literally depicting its subject, none repeated anywhere on the site.
- One featured element per grid, deliberately larger, so the eye knows where to start.
- Dark sections lifted just off pure black, and muted text darkened until contrast genuinely passes instead of merely looking fine.
- Type someone tuned: one family, hierarchy carried by weight, headlines set tight at the right line-height.
- Numbers that are specific, sourced, and slightly inconvenient, the way true numbers always are.
- Crops that were art-directed: faces intact, subjects centered, frames filled on purpose.
The point is not the AI
AI did not invent lazy websites; it industrialized them. The same tells used to ship in cheap themes with demo content half swapped out. What changed is the volume. What did not change is the fix: a person with taste checking the rendered page, cutting what is generic, and refusing to publish what is not true.
We are the wrong studio to ask for an anti-AI sermon. We build with AI constantly and would put the output against anyone's, because nothing leaves here without passing gates a template never faces: real photos or none, real numbers or none, contrast measured, every page reviewed on desktop and a phone viewport before it counts as done.
The difference between an AI template site and expert work was never whether AI was involved. It is whether anyone was holding the bar.
