You can spot an AI-built page in about two seconds, and not because the writing is bad. Five specific things keep showing up, and every one comes from the model filling a gap you left in the brief. So they are not aesthetic opinions, they are defaults, and defaults can be turned off in a sentence.
The five tells
1. Three identical cards. Whatever the page is about, there is a row of three boxes with an icon, a two-word heading and a sentence. Three because that is what the layout wants, not because you have three things to say.
2. A gradient nobody chose. Purple to blue, edge to edge, usually behind the hero. It appears when the brief said nothing about colour.
3. The verb-first heading. "Empower your workflow." "Unlock your potential." "Transform how you work." Grammatically fine, factually empty, and interchangeable between a dentist and a database company.
4. Centred text across the full width. Every block centred, lines running the whole way across, so nothing has a hierarchy and the eye has no left edge to return to.
5. Stock people. Smiling strangers at a laptop, or the 3D-illustration equivalent. A photograph of nobody, in an office that does not exist, doing work unrelated to yours.
Each one is a gap-filler. The model needed a section count, a colour, a headline, an alignment and an image, you did not say, so it used the most statistically common answer on the web.
Six pages that avoid them
We keep a set of live example pages: a service page, a proposal, a presentation, a report, an event page and a portfolio, the shapes people ask for most. Worth opening next to the list above, because what they do instead of each tell is concrete:
- Instead of three cards: as many sections as there are things to say. The proposal has the scope, the price and the timeline, because that is what a proposal contains.
- Instead of a gradient: one accent colour on a plain ground, used for the one action that matters.
- Instead of "Empower your workflow": what the page is, in words the reader would use. A report page says what it found.
- Instead of everything centred: a left edge, one column of text at a readable width, headings that step down.
- Instead of stock people: nothing, or the actual thing. A portfolio shows work; the event page shows the event's own details.
None of that is advanced design. It is the absence of five defaults.
The prompt lines that keep them out
Add these to whatever prompt you use. Negative instructions on purpose: each closes a specific gap.
Rules for this page:
- Use as many sections as the content needs. Do not produce a row of three
cards unless I gave you exactly three things.
- No gradients. Plain background, one accent colour: [colour].
- The headline states what this is, in my words. No "empower", "unlock",
"transform", "elevate", "seamless".
- Left-align body text in one column at a readable width. Centre only the
hero, if anything.
- No stock imagery, no illustrated people, no placeholder photos. If an image
would help and we do not have one, leave the space and tell me what to get.The last line matters more than it looks. An agent told "no stock photos" will often substitute an emoji or an inline SVG of a person, which is the same problem in a different hat. Telling it to leave the gap and report it gets you an honest page with a to-do list.
The full set of prompts, including the one that publishes the result, is in AI website prompts.
Why "looks AI" is worth caring about
Not vanity. A page that reads as generated invites the reader to discount what it says, which is the opposite of what you built it for. And the tells travel together: three cards, a gradient and "Empower your workflow" usually mean nobody decided what the page was for, so the copy is vague too. Readers register that as "this is not about me" long before they could explain why.
What fixes it is what fixes vague copy: deciding who the page is for and what one action it wants. That decision is upstream of every rule above, which is why your prompt is the brief is the piece to read first.
What this does not fix
Design taste is still yours. These rules remove the tells; they do not produce something distinctive. A page with no gradient, no three cards and a real headline is a plain, competent page, which for a proposal or a service page is exactly right and for a brand launch is a starting point, not a finish.
And if the page has to reflect an existing visual identity, say so in the prompt with specifics: the typeface, the exact accent colour, the spacing. "On brand" is not an instruction.
Publish the page once it stops looking generated
The same conversation that wrote it gives it an address, with versions and rollback.