Since late 2022, roughly every SaaS landing page has started to sound the same. Not because founders got lazy, but because a lot of hero copy now starts life inside an LLM — and LLMs have tics. If you've ever read a homepage and thought "this feels like ChatGPT wrote it," you were pattern-matching on something real. This post makes that pattern explicit.
Below are 7 tells you can check by hand in about two minutes, no tooling required. They're deterministic: same input, same verdict. Each one comes with a before/after.
1. Hype verbs with no referent
unlock, supercharge, seamless, elevate, empower, revolutionize, unleash. These words promise a result while describing nothing. Models reach for them because they're high-probability filler in the "marketing" register.
- Before: Unlock seamless collaboration and supercharge your workflow.
- After: Comment on any line of a doc. Changes sync in under 200ms.
The fix is always the same: replace the verb with the mechanism.
2. Zero numbers
Copy that's been through a real customer tends to leak specifics: a price, a time saved, a count, a percentage. AI copy floats above all of it because the model doesn't know your numbers. If your hero and subhead contain zero digits, that's a tell on its own.
- Before: Save time and money on your invoicing.
- After: Send an invoice in 40 seconds. Get paid 6 days faster on average.
3. Filler adverbs and connectors
simply, just, effortlessly, in order to, in today's fast-paced world, and the classic whether you're a startup or an enterprise. That last construction is almost a fingerprint — it's the model hedging across audiences instead of picking one.
- Before: Whether you're a freelancer or a Fortune 500, simply connect your tools and effortlessly automate everything.
- After: Connect Stripe and Slack. Get a ping when a payment fails.
4. Headlines longer than ~14 words
Model-generated headlines tend to cram two value props into one sentence with an "and." Human editors cut. If your H1 runs past ~14 words or leans on a comma splice, it's usually a merge of two headlines that never got resolved.
Count the words in your H1. If it's 15+, you have a cut to make.
5. Generic CTAs
Submit, Learn more, Get started, Sign up. These are the default because the model doesn't know what happens after the click. A CTA written by someone who built the product names the next state.
- Before: Get Started
- After: Grade my landing page — or — See my first invoice
6. Structural symmetry
Three feature cards, each with one icon, a three-word title, and a two-sentence body of identical length. Real content is lumpy — some features need a paragraph, some need a line. Suspicious evenness (every bullet the same length, every section the same shape) is a strong tell, because it's exactly what "generate 3 features" returns.
7. Flat, hedgeless confidence
No opinion, no enemy, no tradeoff. AI copy rarely says "this is not for X" or "we're slower than Y, but here's why." It's agreeable to everyone, which means it's memorable to no one. If you can't find a single sentence that would make some reader decide to leave, the copy is probably AI-flat.
I turned this into a scorer
Reading for these by hand works, but I got tired of doing it, so I encoded the checklist into a free, deterministic scorer — no LLM, runs entirely in your browser, nothing gets sent anywhere. You paste your hero copy, it flags the hype words, missing numbers, filler, and headline length, and returns a score. It's here: Landing Page Grader.
The "deterministic" part matters: because it's rules, not a model, it gives the same verdict every time and shows you exactly why each phrase got flagged. No black box.
The honest caveat
None of these tells are proof. Plenty of good human copy uses "get started," and some AI copy is genuinely sharp after editing. Treat the checklist as a smell test, not a court. The goal isn't to purge every flagged word — it's to notice when a whole page is running on register instead of substance, and to swap vague verbs for the actual mechanism of your product.
If you want the longer version — full word lists, scoring weights, and FAQ — it's written up here: 1h-money-store.vercel.app/faq.
Run your own homepage through the grader and count how many of the 7 it catches. Most pages I test hit at least 3.
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