Was your website built by AI? Seven tells you can check yourself

If you paid an agency and quietly suspect a model did most of the work, you can find out yourself. None of the checks below need a developer, none of them need access to anything you do not already own, and all seven can be done from the site as a visitor sees it. The point is not to catch anyone out. It is that the answer changes what you should do next.

How can I tell if my website was built by AI?

Look for the pattern, not a single clue: repeated structure with tiny inconsistencies, copy that never names anything specific, form fields without labels, no structured data, and page source that is enormous relative to what is on screen. One tell means nothing. 4 or more is an answer.

Tell one: the copy never commits to a fact

Generated marketing prose is fluent and weightless at the same time. It says a business is dedicated to excellence and committed to delivering tailored solutions to every client, and across four hundred words it never once names a town, a price, a year, a piece of equipment or a single customer.

Read your own service page and count the checkable facts. Not adjectives — facts somebody could verify or dispute. If a competitor could paste their name over yours and the page would still be true, no human who knows your business wrote it, and no reader will believe it either.

Tell two: the same thing said four slightly different ways

Open the pages that ought to be near-identical in structure, which usually means your service pages and your location pages. In a site somebody built by hand they share one template, so the button carries the same words in the same position at the same size on every single one.

In a generated site each page was produced in its own pass, so the fourth one says “Get a Quote” where the first said “Request a Quote”, and the spacing above the heading is different by a few pixels. GitClear, which measured 623 million code changes between 2023 and 2026, found duplicated lines up 81% and refactored code down from 21% of changes in 2022 to 3.8% — which is the mechanism behind exactly this symptom.

Tell three: form fields with no labels

Click into the first box on your contact form and watch what happens to the wording. Does a word sit permanently beside or above the field, or does the hint inside it vanish the moment you start typing? A placeholder that disappears when you type is not a label, and never was.

WebAIM’s 2026 survey of the top million home pages found missing form input labels on 51% of them, alongside empty buttons on 30.6%. It is the single most common functional defect in generated forms, and it is also the one that directly costs you enquiries from anybody using a screen reader.

Tell four: nothing tells Google what the business is

Structured data is the small block of machine-readable markup that states your business name, address, opening hours and services in a form software can read. Google publishes both the specification and a free Rich Results Test, which any owner can run against their own URL without installing anything.

Generated sites almost never include it, because nothing in a visual prompt asks for it. If your test comes back with no items detected, your site is telling search engines and AI answer engines nothing at all about who you are — which matters more every year as more answers get assembled rather than listed.

If the site was built in Lovable, the page may be telling crawlers nothing at all until JavaScript runs; getting a Lovable site read by Google covers what to do about it.

Tell five: the page weighs far more than it looks

A simple page that takes several seconds to become usable on a phone is almost always carrying images at full camera resolution, plus scripts that nothing on the page actually uses. Generated builds add libraries speculatively, on the chance they might be needed, and then never remove them again.

Test it away from your own wifi. A three-section service page should be usable in about a second on a normal mobile connection; if yours takes five, the weight is the reason, and weight is the cheapest thing on this list to fix.

Tell six: errors that fail silently

Submit your own contact form with a deliberately wrong email address — no @ sign. A site somebody built tells you what is wrong and where. A generated one often accepts it, shows the thank-you page, and drops the enquiry.

GitClear measured a 47% rise in error-masking constructs over the same window: code that catches a failure and carries on quietly. On a business site that is not an abstraction. It is a customer who thinks they contacted you and a business that never knew.

Tell seven: nobody can answer “why is it built this way”

This is the one that settles it. Ask whoever built the site why a particular decision was made — why that page structure, why that plugin, why the booking flow has those steps. Somebody who made the decision has a reason, even a boring one.

The Stanford study published at ACM CCS on AI coding assistants found that people using them wrote significantly less secure code while being more confident it was secure. Unearned confidence sounds exactly like expertise from the outside. The difference is that expertise can explain itself when you ask a second question.

You found four or more. Now what?

Nothing here is on fire. An AI-built site is not an emergency, and ripping it out this week is usually the wrong call and an expensive one. The order matters more than the speed, because the cheap items on this list are also the ones costing you enquiries today. Work through it in this order:

1. Check that enquiries arrive. Send yourself one from a phone on mobile data. This is the only item that costs you money every single day it is wrong.
2. Label the form fields. Small, cheap, immediate.
3. Add structured data that matches reality — name, address, hours, services.
4. Fix the images. Usually the whole speed problem.
5. Then decide whether the underlying code is worth keeping.

Our free nine-point audit runs items two through four and publishes the result, so you can hand the report to whoever built the site rather than arguing about it. If the answer is that the foundation has to go, what it costs to fix a website AI built has the honest range, and what to ask before you hire a web designer covers the next conversation.