← All guides

Three tells your site was made by AI

The defaults every model reaches for, and what to do instead.

craft·1 min read

AI-generated sites all wear the same uniform. It is not that the code is bad — it is that the defaults are the same defaults every time, and defaults are what make a page look like nobody chose anything.

1 · The gradient

Purple into blue, top-left to bottom-right. Every model reaches for it, so every site wearing it looks like every other site. Replace it with one real colour and light it — a single flat hue on a dark ground beats a gradient because it looks decided.

2 · The three cards

Three equal boxes, three icons, three sentences that say Fast, Secure, Scalable. Equal size means equal importance, which means nothing is important. Make one card bigger and break the row.

3 · The repeated band

Every section full width, centred, same height, all the way down. Change the rhythm — one asymmetric section resets the feel of the entire page.

Why it happens

You asked a model for “a website”, so it handed you the average of every website it has seen. Averages are never interesting. Stop asking for a website and give it three things instead:

  • A reference — something that already exists. An era, a medium, a printed thing.
  • A constraint — what it may not do. One accent colour. No gradients. Never centred.
  • One idea — the single thing the whole page is built around.

Two more tells that did not fit in thirty seconds

  • Flat spacing. The same gap between everything means nothing is grouped and the eye cannot find the structure.
  • That hero. Headline, sub-line, two buttons — you have seen it a thousand times. Lead with the product instead.

If you only fix one thing, fix the spacing. Uneven spacing reads as taste faster than colour does.