Stock phrases that make an AI-built site read as AI-built
Visitors do not read your source code to decide whether a model wrote your site. They read the first screen and recognise the defaults. Here are the common ones, and what to put in their place.
Published 2 October 2026 · 5 min read
Nobody opens your HTML to decide whether a model wrote your site. They look at the first screen for a few seconds and compare it, without meaning to, with the many similar pages they have already seen. Some phrases and design choices have become so common on AI-generated landing pages that they work as a tell.
Two things are worth saying before the list. First, every one of these also appears on sites written entirely by people, often because those people copied the same templates. Second, the real cost is not that a visitor concludes “a model wrote this”. Being built with AI is not a problem anyone actually has with a site. The cost is that these phrases carry no information, so the visitor learns nothing and leaves. The longer version of why this happens is in why vibe coded websites look the same.
The short version: when a prompt gives a model little to go on, it returns the safest, most average output it can. The phrases below are what the average sounds like.
Verbs that promise change without saying what changes
Streamline your workflow. Supercharge, unlock the power of, elevate, empower, transform, revolutionize, unleash, take your business to the next level, harness the power of.
Each one says something will get better and nothing about what or how. Replace the verb with the action the product performs and the object it performs it on.
- Instead of “Streamline your invoicing”, say what disappears: “Send the invoice from your phone before you leave the job.”
- Instead of “Unlock the power of your data”, say what the person sees: “See which customers stopped ordering this month.”
Adjectives anyone can claim
Seamless, effortless, powerful, intuitive, robust, cutting-edge, next-generation, state-of-the-art, best-in-class, all-in-one, lightning-fast, AI-powered.
An adjective is a claim with the evidence removed. Put the evidence back and delete the adjective. “Lightning-fast” becomes the time you actually measured, if you measured it. “Intuitive” becomes “No setup: paste a link.” “AI-powered” becomes what the AI does for the reader, or nothing at all, since most visitors care about the result rather than the method.
Social proof with nobody in it
Trusted by thousands. Loved by teams. Join thousands of happy users. Used by teams at, followed by a row of logos. Don't just take our word for it, followed by testimonials from people with stock photos and no surnames.
If you have real users, name one, with their permission, and say what they actually did with the product. If you do not have them yet, say what is true instead: “Launched in September. Free while in beta. Built by one person, who answers the support email.” Honest early-stage copy reads better than borrowed scale, and fabricated testimonials are a consumer-protection problem in many places, not only a style problem.
Speed and scale with no number
10x, in minutes, in seconds, at scale, save hours, ship faster, build faster, work smarter, faster than ever, focus on what matters.
Either give the number and what it is measured against, or name the step that goes away. “Save hours” says nothing; “No more exporting to a spreadsheet every Friday” says exactly which hours.
Headline shapes
Some patterns are about structure rather than words. These are the ones a model reaches for when it has no specific claim to make:
| Shape | Example | What to do instead |
|---|---|---|
| Imperative pairs | Build faster. Ship smarter. | One sentence that says what the product does |
| The X for Y | The all-in-one platform for modern teams | Name the job and the person, not the category |
| Your ultimate X | Your all-in-one workspace | Say what is in the workspace |
| X, made simple | Invoicing, made simple. Email, reimagined. | Say which part used to be hard, and what happens now |
| Meet / Introducing | Meet Acme, your AI assistant | Lead with what it does; the name can come second |
| The future of X | The future of hiring | Describe the present: what it does today |
A useful structure instead: the headline says what the product does for whom, the line under it says how or gives the one fact that makes it believable, and the button says what happens next.
Buttons that only say “click”
Get started. Learn more. Sign up. Try it free. Book a demo. Join the waitlist.
A button label is the last sentence a visitor reads before deciding. Make it say what happens when they press it: “Clean my CSV”, “See a sample report”, “Create the first invoice”. If the honest label is “Join the waitlist”, it helps to say what they are waiting for and roughly when.
The design defaults
The copy is the half people read, but the layout is what they see first. The common defaults:
- A centred hero on a violet-to-indigo gradient.
- Inter or Geist as the only typeface.
- Untouched shadcn/ui components, with their default radius, borders and shadows.
- Three rounded feature cards in a row, each with a Lucide icon at the top.
- Glassmorphism, soft glows, and a faint grid in the background.
- A three-tier pricing table with the middle plan highlighted.
These are good tools and reasonable choices. The tell is the combination, left exactly as it arrived. Changing one or two is enough to make the page read as chosen rather than generated: one accent colour you picked, a different typeface, two columns or a list instead of three cards, and a real screenshot instead of an abstract illustration. These changes are made in the tool you built the site with.
How to check your own page
- Run the free vibe coded website checker on your URL. It looks for the patterns above (stock phrases, generic buttons, headline shapes, gradients, default fonts and components) and shows what it found, why it reads as default and what to change. It makes no model call and is a heuristic with visible rules, not a detector.
- Do the competitor test. Replace your product's name with a competitor's in each sentence on the first screen. Every sentence that still works says nothing about you.
- Read the first screen aloud to someone in your audience and ask them to explain it back. Their words are a better draft than any list of banned phrases.
One caution. Deleting these phrases does not make copy good; it makes room. What goes into the gap has to come from something the model did not have, mainly the words your customers use. The post on silent copy failure covers how to collect them.
For transparency: the checker is free and part of IntentGrid's site. IntentGrid itself rewrites a page's copy per visitor, which is a different thing. A model rewriting a stock phrase still produces a model's sentence, so whatever you use, you remain the reviewer.