Some tells hide in the CSS and some in the copy. One hides in the quotation marks. Ten specimens are reproduced below.
Em dashes every hundred words
Build faster — ship sooner — scale forever.
Your workflow — reimagined. Your team — unstoppable.
Language models lean on the em dash to splice fragments into rhythm, so it lands in headlines and button labels alike at a rate no human copywriter sustains. Any single em dash is unremarkable, so what you are looking for is the count.
Indigo-to-violet on slate
Always the same purple: Tailwind's indigo (#615fff) and violet (#8e51ff) on a slate ground (#0f172b), hex-identical across thousands of generated sites. The palette is a statistical average of thousands of SaaS sites, so it repeats.
Left-border accent cards
The gradient sliver down a card's left edge delivers instant polish without a single committed decision. Remove it and nothing about the layout changes.
Rocket, lightbulb and sparkles
The same three emoji anchor feature sections across the generated web. A drawn icon inherits your colors and your weight; an emoji inherits whatever the visitor's operating system decides.
Testimonials from Sarah Johnson
“This changed everything for our team.”
Sarah Johnson · CEO, TechCorp“An absolute game changer.”
John Smith · CTO, InnovateCoFive stars from a CEO named Sarah Johnson and a CTO named John Smith, praising nothing in particular. Real testimonials tend to name a specific feature and a specific outcome, because that is what the customer actually remembered.
No real photography anywhere
No product shots and no team page, just gradient fills and the occasional hyperreal generated image where evidence of an actual company should be. A real business accumulates photographs by existing, and a site with none of them is missing ordinary evidence.
Typographically perfect quotes
“Effortless.”
"we typed this one ourselves"
All the quotation marks are curly, because a model emits typographic quotes by default while people type straight ones and rarely fix them. Mixed quotes across a page usually mean a person wrote it.
Rigid, mechanical symmetry
Three cards of identical height with descriptions trimmed to the same word count, in a grid balanced to the pixel. Real content arrives in awkward lengths, so a grid this even usually means the copy was written to fit the boxes rather than the other way round.
Whitespace instead of decisions
Enormous vertical padding around thin content, the mobile-first default stretched across a desktop viewport. Scroll past three screens of air between two paragraphs and you are looking at spacing nobody chose.
The soulless average
None of these tells is damning alone. Together they describe the average of a few million training examples: technically correct and forgettable.
Continue with the primary source behind this study: Mateusz Sikora's original checklist at sikora.software.