What it looks like
“Elevate your business.” “Unlock your potential.” “Seamless integration, effortless results.” “A game-changing, next-level platform that empowers teams.” The verbs cluster in the headline, the subhead and the first three card titles, and the nouns under them could be swapped between any two sites without anyone noticing.
Why it gives a page away
These are the words a language model reaches for when it is asked for a website and given nothing to say about the business. They are not wrong, they are empty: each promises an outcome without naming a thing, a number or a person. Wikipedia’s editors keep a list of the same vocabulary for spotting generated text, and it reads like a sitemap of these pages. A strong tell when three or more appear above the fold. A single “seamless” happens to the best of us.
How to check your own site
Read your first screen aloud and count: elevate, unlock, empower, streamline, seamless, effortless, next-level, game-changing, cutting-edge, robust. Three or more, and the copy was not written about your business.
What a designer would do instead
Replace every one of them with the thing itself: the product, the price, the place, the time it takes, the name of a customer who said so. “Invoices out in 40 seconds” beats “effortless billing” on every page it has ever been tried on.
When it is not a tell
A single one of these words in a sentence that otherwise says something specific. The tell is the cluster, not the word.
Sources
Builders whose defaults include this one
An entry names a builder only when its fingerprints are visible; this tell is one of them for 10Web and Chatbot copy in any template.
Other tells in copy
- "In today's fast-paced world": An opening line that begins with the state of the world: "In today's fast-paced digital landscape", "In an ever-evolving market", "Now more than ever".
- Emoji bullets: Lists whose bullets are a rocket, a sparkle, a check mark or a light bulb, usually one per feature, usually the same four.
- Lorem ipsum shipped: Placeholder text, "Your text here", "Heading 2" or "[Company name]" left on the live site.
- No sentence only this business could have written: Read every sentence on the home page. None of them names a place, a person, a year, a price, a real customer or a real limitation.
- Suspiciously round numbers: "10,000+ happy customers", "99.9% satisfaction", "500+ projects delivered", on a company that registered its domain this spring.
- Testimonials from Sarah J.: Quotes from "Sarah J., Marketing Manager" and "Michael T., CEO", with generated portraits, praising the product in the product's own vocabulary.
- The swap-test headline: A headline of the form "Innovative solutions for your business" or "Your reliable partner for X": swap in a competitor's name and nothing changes.
