What it looks like
An About page or a hero subhead that opens with the state of the world: “In today’s fast-paced digital landscape”, “In an ever-evolving market”, “Now more than ever”, “In the age of AI”. In German: “In der heutigen schnelllebigen Welt”. The business arrives in sentence two, if at all.
Why it gives a page away
Nobody opens a sales conversation this way. It is the model warming up: a sentence that could introduce any company on earth, and therefore introduces none. The pattern is so stable that the phrase works as a search term for finding generated pages.
How to check your own site
Read the first sentence of your About page. If it does not contain your name, your product, your town or your customer, it is introducing the world rather than you. Delete it and read the second sentence; that is usually the real opening.
What a designer would do instead
Start with the fact a visitor came for. “We fix heat pumps in Oranienburg, since 2009.” “Three lawyers, one specialism: commercial leases.” The world can look after itself.
When it is not a tell
A deliberate essay that argues a point about the market and then takes a position. Rare on a home page, and obvious when it happens, because it says something.
Builders whose defaults include this one
An entry names a builder only when its fingerprints are visible; this tell is one of them for Chatbot copy in any template.
Other tells in copy
- Elevate, unlock, seamless, empower: Headlines and subheads built from the model's favourite verbs: elevate, unlock, empower, streamline, seamless, effortless, next-level, game-changing.
- 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.
