Was This Website Built by AI? 7 Ways to Find Out
You landed on a site that felt a little too polished, a little too generic, or oddly familiar — and now you're asking the obvious question: was this website built by AI? Here are seven concrete things to check yourself, roughly in the order they're worth trying.
1. View the actual page source
Right-click and choose "View Page Source," not "Inspect." You want the raw HTML the server sent, not what JavaScript has rewritten it into. Search for a meta name="generator" tag near the top — some builders declare themselves outright.
2. Look at where images and scripts load from
Still in the page source, scan for script and image URLs pointing at a domain that isn't the site itself. Design-tool builders commonly keep serving assets from their own CDN even after a custom domain is connected, which is one of the harder things for a site owner to hide.
3. Check for a small floating badge
Some AI builders add a corner badge to the live site unless it's explicitly turned off — often reading something like an editing prompt or a credit line linking back to the platform. It's the clearest possible answer to "was this website built by AI," but plenty of real owners remove it, so its absence doesn't clear a site either.
4. Read the copy critically
Generic marketing phrases repeated with no specific detail, section headings that could apply to literally any business, and copy that never mentions a real name, place, or concrete fact are common in unedited, one-shot AI output. This is weak evidence on its own — plenty of humans write generic copy too — but it adds up alongside everything else.
5. Notice what CMS signals are missing
The absence of WordPress, Drupal, or similar traditional CMS markers isn't proof of anything by itself, but their presence is a genuinely strong sign you're looking at a human-run, traditionally built site — those platforms leave consistent, hard-to-fake structural evidence in every page they render.
6. Check if it just links to an AI tool
Don't mistake a mention for a confession. A page that reviews, recommends, or links out to an AI builder is not evidence it was built there — that's a genuinely common false signal, one we had to fix in our own detector after our own tool-comparison page tripped over it.
7. Run it through an actual detector
Manual checking gets you most of the way, but an automated scan catches CDN references and class-prefix patterns that are tedious to spot by eye and cross-checks all six signal categories in one pass.
Paste the URL in and get your answer — with the exact evidence shown, not just a score.