- topic
- Building with AI
- for
- Founders who built their site with AI tools
- date
- 2026-10-29
How to make your website look less AI-generated
A site looks AI-made when it ships the tool’s defaults: a purple gradient, Inter everywhere, a badge above a centered headline and three identical feature cards. In April 2026, Adrian Krebs checked 1,590 recent Show HN landing pages for 18 of these patterns. 22% used four or more, and only 46% used one or none (Krebs). No single pattern is wrong. Together, they make your startup look like everyone else’s. Here’s how to spot them and what to do instead.
Why it matters
People decide whether they like a page fast. In a classic study, visitors rated a page’s visual appeal after 50 milliseconds, and those snap ratings matched the ones they gave after a longer look (Lindgaard et al., 2006; Nature). So the first impression is mostly the look, and the look is where the defaults show. Krebs calls the trend uninspired rather than bad, and he’s right that validating an idea never needed fancy design. For a weekend project, the defaults are fine. They become a problem when you ask a stranger for money, a demo or their data, because a site that looks like a template reads as a product that might be one too.
The 18 tells, and what to do instead
Krebs checked each pattern with code against the page itself, not by eye, and estimates 5% to 10% false positives (Krebs).
| Area | The tells | What to do instead |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Inter for everything; Space Grotesk, Instrument Serif or Geist pairings; one serif italic word in an Inter headline | Pick a headline typeface with character, and set sizes and spacing on purpose |
| Color | “VibeCode Purple”; gradients everywhere; big colored glows and shadows | Use your brand’s palette, with one accent color used sparingly |
| Dark mode | Dark by default, with grey body text and all-caps section labels | Default to what your buyers read best, and keep body text at a 4.5:1 contrast or higher (W3C) |
| Hero | A centered headline in a generic sans, with a badge above it | Lead with the product: a real screenshot, a short demo or one specific claim |
| Cards | Identical feature cards with an icon on top; colored top or left borders | Show each feature working, with a screenshot or a clip |
| Steps and stats | Numbered 1, 2, 3 steps; a banner row of big numbers | Keep them only when the steps are real and the numbers are sourced |
| Labels and icons | All-caps headings and labels; emoji icons in the nav or sidebar | Sentence case, and one icon set drawn to match |
| Components | shadcn/ui defaults; glassmorphism | Keep the components, but restyle the radius, spacing, color and type |
You don’t need to remove all 18. Fix the hero, the type and the color first: they’re what a visitor sees in those first 50 milliseconds.
Fix the words, not just the look
AI copy has tells too, and they sit right next to the design ones. A headline like “Supercharge your workflow with AI” could sit on a thousand sites. Say what the product does, for whom, in one sentence a customer would repeat. Swap generated illustrations for real screenshots of the product. Show only real logos, quotes and numbers, from customers who said yes. Cut any section that says the same thing as the one above it. The design and the copy work together: a specific sentence makes a plain layout feel intentional, and a vague one makes even a good layout feel generic.
A prompt to give your AI tool
If you’re iterating in Lovable, v0, Bolt or Claude, paste this and fill in the brackets:
Redesign this landing page so it doesn’t look AI-generated. Avoid: Inter as the only font, purple or blue gradients, glowing shadows, glassmorphism, a badge above a centered headline, identical icon cards, numbered 1, 2, 3 steps, stat banners, emoji icons and all-caps labels. Use: [your brand colors], [your headline typeface] for headlines, a left-aligned hero with a real product screenshot, sentence case, one accent color, and body text with at least 4.5:1 contrast. Rewrite the headline to say what [product] does for [customer] in one sentence, using one real number if we have one.
It won’t make the site distinctive on its own, since a tool can only remix what it has seen. But it removes the defaults, which gets you from “template” to “someone made choices”.
When to get a designer
If your site is for a side project or a quick test, the steps above are enough. Bring in a designer when the site has to earn trust from people who don’t know you yet: investors before a round, buyers at companies, or anyone you’re asking for their data. That’s also when the rest of the product needs a look, as covered in why a vibe-coded MVP works but doesn’t convert. The launch page checklist lists what a first page needs before you share it.
What we offer
Our Launch Page gives you a one-page site with your own type, color and copy, live in 5 business days for $3,500. If you need brand essentials too, the Launch Sprint, from $9,500, adds them to a 5 to 8 page site you can edit yourself. Book a 20-minute call, and you’ll get a one-page plan with a fixed price within 24 hours.