Spotting AI-generated junk sites in the wild

I recently spent twenty minutes reading a recipe for sourdough starter that eventually pivoted into a lecture on the geopolitical importance of wheat exports. The prose was technically perfect and entirely hollow. I felt like I was being fed digital sawdust by a machine that had never tasted bread. This is the new baseline for the internet.

You can usually spot the rot by looking at the photos first. AI junk sites love a specific kind of high-gloss stock photography where the lighting is too purposeful and the people look like they were born in a boardroom. If every person in the images is smiling at a salad with the exact same level of intensity, you are in a content farm.

Check the paragraph lengths. Human beings are messy writers who get distracted or excited. We write one long, rambling sentence followed by a three-word punch. A bot produces a wall of uniform blocks that look like they were measured with a ruler. If the visual rhythm of the text is too consistent, the author probably doesn’t have a pulse.

Then there is the ghost author problem. Look for a byline that actually points to a human being with a verifiable history on the internet. If the article is credited to Staff or a name that leads to a dead LinkedIn profile with a blurry headshot, close the tab. These sites are built to harvest ad revenue, not to provide a service.

Watch the dates and the footnotes. A bot will happily cite a 2024 study that doesn’t exist or claim a product was released three years before its actual launch. They hallucinate authority because they are designed to predict the next likely word, not the truth. When you see a citation, search for the title of the study in a separate window.

The most damning tell is the lack of a take. A human writer will eventually get annoyed, or sarcastic, or weirdly passionate about a specific detail. A machine just summarizes the consensus until the word count hit. If you finish reading and realize the author didn't actually express an opinion, you've been handled.

Stop scrolling the moment you feel that sense of uncanny repetition. Your time is finite and the machines have an infinite supply of garbage. If the site feels like it was written by a committee of toasters, it probably was. Move on to something written by someone with a grudge or a hobby.