Which AI design tells hold up? We measured 247 sites

The short version Lists of AI design tells are everywhere, and most are written from impressions. We wanted counts. So we opened 247 sites in a browser and measured each tell on the whole page, the same way the free check at plagio.dev does: 122 built with Lovable, Bolt, v0 or Base44, and 125 made by hand.

Some tells are real. Some are about as common on hand-made sites, and a few point the other way. Below, each number is the share of sites in that group where the tell shows up.

The tells that hold up

These are at least twice as common on AI-built pages. Most are layout habits, not colours.

The small all-caps label above a section title is the clearest of them: a quarter of AI-built pages have two or more, against one in twenty hand-made ones. The pill badge above the hero title and the icon in a tinted square above every feature title follow close behind. None of them is wrong on its own. They give a page away because they come together, in the same order, on page after page.

The tells that don't

These are cited often, but the gap is small. Seen alone, they say little.

Stock phrases are the surprise: unlock, seamless, supercharge and the rest turned up on 9% of sites in both groups. Em dashes lean AI, but a fifth of hand-made sites use them too. Inter or a system font set nearly everything on half of AI-built pages and on nearly a third of hand-made ones, so a default font says less than people think.

The ones that point the other way

Large purple or indigo surfaces were rarer on AI-built pages than on hand-made ones in our set. Whatever was true of the builders' early output, purple isn't what gives a page away now, and banning it in a prompt mostly moves the model to the next most common look. What hand-made sites have more of is real imagery: photos or video covering a sizeable part of the page, and illustration drawn for the site.

What we left out of the score

Two things separate the groups better than anything above: shadcn's theme variables (79% of AI-built pages, 6% of hand-made) and Lucide icons (68% against 4%). We measure them but don't score them. They say which tools a site was built with, and plenty of careful, hand-made sites use both. A score should say how a page looks.

How we measured

• AI-built sites came from madewithlovable.com, lovable.dev/discover, madewithbolt.com, v0.app templates and Base44 apps, on 6 November 2026.
• Hand-made sites mix well-known companies, small studios from minimal.gallery, indie products, open-source project sites and plain personal blogs, so the comparison isn't big versus small.
• Each page was opened at 1280 pixels wide, scrolled to the end, and read from what the browser painted, not from the HTML alone. Fifteen sites that didn't load or showed fewer than eight elements were dropped.
• A builder's showcase favours sites people were proud of, so the AI-built group is, if anything, better than average.

The patterns we looked for come from Adrian Krebs' study of 1,590 sites and from impeccable's list of rules, plus our own. Check your own site at plagio.dev to see which of them it has.