Spotting AI-generated junk sites in the wild

I was looking for a recipe for pickled red onions last night and ended up on a site that felt like it was written by a ghost who had once skimmed a textbook on vinegar. The layout was clinical. Every single paragraph was exactly four lines long, creating a visual rhythm that felt more like a barcode than a human thought. Humans are messy, prone to tangents, and occasionally concise. AI is a metronome of mediocrity.

You have to look at the photos first. If every image features a diverse group of people laughing at a salad in a kitchen that looks like a high-end appliance showroom, you are in the junk zone. Look at the hands or the way shadows hit the floor. AI sites rely on stock photography that has been scrubbed of any identifiable location or soul. If the site claims to be about a neighborhood in Chicago but the streetlights look vaguely European, close the tab and leave.

Check the dates on the articles. A common tell is a site that claims to be a decade old but has four hundred posts all published between Tuesday and Thursday of last week. These sites are built in bursts by scrapers that ingest thousands of keywords at once. They don't have an archive because they don't have a history. They are digital strip malls built overnight on a foundation of sand and cheap server space.

There is rarely a real person attached to these projects. If the author is a generic first name like Admin or a face that looks like a composite of every C-tier actor in Hollywood, it is a fabrication. Genuine writers usually have a footprint. They have a Twitter account where they complain about the weather or a LinkedIn that shows they actually went to school somewhere. If the About Us page reads like a corporate mission statement for a company that sells air, you are being played.

The most dangerous tell is the fake citation. These sites love to mention a recent study or a university report to gain unearned authority. If you actually search for the title of that study, you will often find it doesn't exist. The AI just hallucinated a title that sounded plausible enough to satisfy a casual reader. It is a confidence trick performed by a machine that doesn't know what a fact is.

You have to be a bit of an investigator now. Don't just consume the text; look at the architecture of the lie. If a site feels too smooth, too uniform, and too devoid of any specific local flavor, it probably wasn't made for you. It was made for a search engine crawler that doesn't have a pulse. You deserve better than a machine's hallucination of a blog post.