Why sites look AI-made

The patterns that give it away, and what this builder does about them.

People can usually tell. Not from anything subtle — from a short list of patterns that appear by default unless a model is told not to produce them. A purple-to-blue gradient, three feature cards with an icon each, a centered headline with two buttons, and copy that would be true of any company in any industry.

Every rule below is sent with each generation. You do not have to remember them; they are here so you know what the builder is already doing on your behalf, and so you can tell when something slipped through.

Visual

Color

No purple-to-blue or indigo-to-violet gradient, as a background, a button or text. This is the single strongest signal of machine-generated design.
No gradient text, and no gradient on a background that has no image behind it.
No colored glow used as a shadow — a shadow is gray or it is absent.
Do not invent a second accent color. One accent, used for the primary action and nothing else.

Surfaces

No glassmorphism, frosted blur or translucent panel stacks.
No card inside a card inside a section. One level of nesting is the limit.
No huge rounded "floating shell" wrapping the whole page.
No left accent bar on every container.

Layout

Do not default to a centered hero with an eyebrow label, a headline, one subtitle and two buttons. It is the most over-produced layout on the web.
Do not default to three equal feature cards with an icon, a title and two lines. If three things must be listed, consider a table, a numbered list, or three rows.
Do not use an icon beside every heading.
Vary section rhythm — if two adjacent sections have the same structure, change one.

Motion

No element that scales, bounces, springs or lifts on hover.
No fade-in-on-scroll on every section.
No pulsing or animated dot to signal that something is live.
No parallax.

Iconography

Never use emoji as interface icons.
Do not place an icon where a word would be clearer.
Use a single icon family at one weight, or no icons at all.

Writing

Forbidden phrasing

Never write "Empower", "Unlock", "Seamlessly", "Elevate", "Revolutionise", "Supercharge", "Take it to the next level", "Best-in-class", "Cutting-edge", "Game-changing".
No sentence that would be true of any business in any industry.
No exclamation marks in body copy.

Required specificity

Every heading must say something only this business could say.
Use concrete nouns from the brief: the actual service names, place names, prices, hours, materials, durations.
Where a number is unknown, omit the claim rather than inventing one.

Never fabricate

No invented testimonials, names, photographs or job titles.
No "trusted by" logo strip with made-up companies.
No fake statistics, award badges or review scores.
No lorem ipsum. If content is unknown, write a short honest placeholder that names what belongs there.

Craft, not taste

Structure

One h1 per page, and headings that descend in order without skipping a level.
Use header, nav, main, section, article and footer — not a tree of divs.
Every image needs alt text that describes it, or an empty alt if it is decorative.

Interaction

Every interactive element must be reachable and operable by keyboard, with a visible focus state.
Body text must meet 4.5:1 contrast against its background; large text 3:1.
Tap targets at least 44px in their smallest dimension on touch screens.

Responsive

No horizontal scrolling at any width from 320px up.
Wide content — tables, code, wide images — scrolls inside its own container.
Nothing overlaps or clips when text wraps to more lines than expected.

The one test worth running yourself

Read your finished page and ask: could this be any other business? If the headline, the sections and the images would work unchanged for a different company in a different industry, it is not finished. The fix is always the same — replace something general with something only you could say. A real price, a real street, a real dish, a real year.