AI tell
Hype vocabulary declined in the Product Hunt sample
The combined rate for the tracked marketing words declined in sampled Product Hunt launches after late 2024. Their combined rate in the PubMed sample was higher in early 2026.
AI design
has a tell.
A living index of the visual habits, copy patterns, and suspiciously polished defaults that make a website feel generated before it feels designed.
AI tell
Comparing word rates with “however” and “thus”
The combined rate for the tracked vocabulary declined in Hacker News comments. The combined use of “however” and “thus” declined more sharply over the same period.
AI tell
Rounded corners were on 93 percent of crawled pages in November 2022
We compared six CSS properties associated with our visual tells against HTTP Archive crawls from 2019 to 2026. Rounded corners and box shadows were already common when ChatGPT launched.
AI tell
Our AI word list, counted on Hacker News
We looked up this guide's vocabulary list in every Hacker News comment since 2015. Nineteen of the words are countable. None moved by more than a factor of two since ChatGPT, while 796 other words moved that much or more.
AI tell
A third of the AI-built sites are gone by the next crawl
One builder signs its work in the markup, so the web's monthly census can count its sites. It can also count how many of them are gone a month later.
AI tell
Seven signs of a vibe-coded UI
The visual habits that surface when nobody overrode the model's first instinct.
AI tell
Ten red flags of an AI-designed website
From punctuation to palette, the fingerprints a generated site leaves behind.
Human guided design
GOV.UK: constraint as a design language
A recognizable system whose visual restraint is documented in public, principle by principle.
